Category: News and Views
Hey folks
I don't know if it's just my Jaws that's acting up or if big bad hacker bobby posted the link to the disputed article in such a way that prevented me completely from posting a reply since any link I hit in, or below, his post brings me straight to the page, even when I try to edit a response.
Innu Princess is very upset because she feels that the MY Times article she refers to is claiming life with disability is worth less than without. It's definitely a viewpoint but I disagree (definitely go read the article).
The article addresses the fact that the U.S. is spending way more money on healthcare than other nations and getting a lot less in return so, at some point, choices have to be made if this is to change, without change the system will go bankrupt and the country with it, matter of fact.
Prof Singers argument is simply, if you ask a disabled person whether he chooses to live 10 years with his disability or if he'd choose to live fewer years without it, waht would he say and what would it indicate. If he says he'd take a treatment that allows him to live 8 years without his disability, it means he values life without disability at 25% more than with, if you simply take it in numberical terms. If he says that life without disability and life with disability have exactly the same benefits to him, then it also implies, if we look at the numbers, that there's no point in curing him since he won't get anything more out of life, so spending a lot of money on a cure is, equally, not necessarily a good investment.
I remember an old discussion here on whether people would like to be cured of blindness, a surprising amount of people said they wouldn't, so it follows that we should not spend a lot of money forcing a cure upon these people, it'd go against their wishes and possibly make their lives worse.
In general I think the article is very well throught out and finally someone writes something that is not full of platitudes and Hallmark-style catch phrases.
I think there should be a nation wide medicare program that is strictly governed, that allows you to get basic treatment without going bankrupt, and then you have the option of buying additional insurance that would allow you access to more expensive drugs etc. The argument I've seen evenon TV ads now is that we don't want healthcare like those in Canada or the UK, as prof Singer points out much higher percentage of people there are satisfied and trust in their healthcare than people in the U.S. and they do not have to pay remotely as much for it.
I know the difference. Here we pay $200 a month for healthcare, yet we have $2000 deductable, insurance company makes us make a lot of phone calls, tries to bill us over that amount, refuse treatment after our deductable has finished, and still we get tons of medicl bills, sometimes from a collection agency because the hospital or clinic or lab got our address wrong (even if we told them time and again what the correct address was). I sufferred cancer here but had it treated in my home country of Iceland and paid nothing. Here I did get the luxury of a PET scan, where they inject you with radioactive material and it tells the doctor in much more detail the number of cancerous cells, in Iceland I could only get the regular CT scan. Fact is though, this made no difference to the treatment and was merely a luxury, costing probably 10 or 20000 dollars to the insurance company.
Also American drug companies seem to spend endless resources on E.D. drugs and fertilization, because they turn bigger profits than, say, cancer drug research, and they seem to be able to demand any price of the U.S. patients and their insurance plans.
What irritates me the most though is Americans willingness to put a price on everything else but life, any discomfort or loss of any functionality in their body, any pain sufferred is immediately a liability that you have against the doctor that saved you.
And I feel those types of law suits need to stop, or at least have some rational limit. If you lose your finger as a result of a doctors mistake you will likely get enough money to retire, buy an expensive house and 3 cars and live happily for 60 years, even if the loss of the finger really caused discomfort and slowed down your typing by 10% as well as making your piano playing a bit tricky. I'm not saying the person should not have been entitled to something, but I don't see that something exceeding may be 6 months work, free hospitalization and may be some rehab. These types of ridiculous law suits are killing the system and Obama does not have the guts to stand up and say that enough is enough.
As an unrelated example, and I posted this elsewhere, each family of the Virginia university shootings victims got an 11 million dollar settlement. Assuming that the average age of the student is 20 years and they will enter the job market at 21 and work for 40 years the compensation is roughly equivalent to saying they would have made 265000 dollars every year of that time, the average American earns, I believe, 47000 dollars a year, given that these are smart people with supposedly good degrees we can give them another 30% and give them roughly 65000 dollars a year or around 2.5 million. But eventhat is beside the point, families of those who died at the same school of cancer got nothing but funeral bills and collection calls from the labs because their insurance company failed to provide the right address, probably 15 to 25000 dollars in bills all in all. Why did the state have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to these families, why are these deaths worth a lot more because a crazy Korean kid shot them, how will it mend anything that those famlies now morn in a fancy house on a private island with a yacht? If there really were security problems, use the funding to address them, create a memorial fund, if the victim was a teacher whose family depended on him for their living, then provide them with support financially, but can you imagine how many scholarships could have been paid, how many lives could have been saved, books purchased,computers purchased,low income families given chance of studying, if these families hadn't collected these huge pay checks. I'd never donate to this university knowing what the money was used for (fine,probably it was a state school, so, well, there go my taxes I suppose, or would if I livedin Va).
I think it is perfectly rational to get together a committee of people and do estimations of how different types of doctors mistake affect people's earning potential and set a limit to them, and also come down much harder on those who are clearly in this for the money. I understand the right to get compensation for suffering because of the dcotors mistake is good in that it provides a check in the system and insures the doctors treat people with utmost cre, but I find the amounts in uestion ridiculous and this option way over used.
Bottomline, I think this system is severely messed up and I am ashamed of all these greedy people out there and the fact your average GP pays $30000 dollars a year in liability insurance, and you know who has to ultimately pay for that, .. you I'm afraid, that's who. I'm also rather saddened by the hypocracy displayed that life is infinitely valuable and never can a number be put on the value of that life, but anything else has a price tag, and a hefty one, if you saw the scene in Office Space where the guy is almost killed and has never been happier, you know what I mean.
cheers
-B
Actually, w-b, it's just your loggon that the link messes up. (just kidding). I don't know what went wrong.
Thanks for a well thought out response. You said what I wanted to say, but you said it better, and with more anger.
Bob