Is this what health care rationing would look like?
1 Quadriplegic = Half a Human Life, 1 Teen = Fourteen 85 Year Olds
That is the assumption behind a benchmark some, including Peter Singer, are urging for inclusion in any overhaul of the U.S. health system. It's called QALY or Quality of Life Years and the U.S. government has already endorsed it by including substantial funds for research on the concept in the "stimulus" bill. Here's how Peter Singer explained it in the New York Times:
As a first take, we might say that the good achieved by health care is the number of lives saved. But that is too crude. The death of a teenager is a greater tragedy than the death of an 85-year-old, and this should be reflected in our priorities. We can accommodate that difference by calculating the number of life-years saved, rather than simply the number of lives saved. If a teenager can be expected to live another 70 years, saving her life counts as a gain of 70 life-years, whereas if a person of 85 can be expected to live another 5 years, then saving the 85-year-old will count as a gain of only 5 life-years. That suggests that saving one teenager is equivalent to saving 14 85-year-olds.
The principle for Singer applies not only to age, but disability as well:
One common method is to describe medical conditions to people — let’s say being a quadriplegic — and tell them that they can choose between 10 years in that condition or some smaller number of years without it. If most would prefer, say, 10 years as a quadriplegic to 4 years of nondisabled life, but would choose 6 years of nondisabled life over 10 with quadriplegia, but have difficulty deciding between 5 years of nondisabled life or 10 years with quadriplegia, then they are, in effect, assessing life with quadriplegia as half as good as nondisabled life. (These are hypothetical figures, chosen to keep the math simple, and not based on any actual surveys.) If that judgment represents a rough average across the population, we might conclude that restoring to nondisabled life two people who would otherwise be quadriplegics is equivalent in value to saving the life of one person, provided the life expectancies of all involved are similar. . .
.Mark Steyn asks
How did the health-care debate decay to the point where we think it entirely natural for the central government to fix a collective figure for what 300 million freeborn citizens ought to be spending on something as basic to individual liberty as their own bodies?
Elsewhere he calls it The Nationalization of Your Body
If you peel the Census Bureau and DHHS figures, of those alleged “45 million uninsured Americans”, one-fifth aren’t Americans; another fifth aren’t uninsured but are covered by Medicare; another two-fifths are the young and mobile (they don’t have health insurance, but they don’t have life insurance or home insurance, either: they’re 22 and immortal and life’s a party); and the remaining fifth are wealthier than the insured population. Really. According to a 2006 Census Bureau report, 19 per cent of the uninsured have household income of over $75,000. Since the last round of government “reform” in the Nineties, wealthy Americans have been fleeing insurance and opting to bring health care back to a normal market transaction. And, if you look at the “uninsured discount” offered by doctors, one can appreciate that, for everything but chronic disability, it’s not an irrational decision to say I’ll get a better deal for my broken leg or my colonoscopy or my heavy cold if I just write a check for it.
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What’s so moral about relieving the citizen of responsibility for his own health care? If free citizens of the wealthiest societies in human history are not prepared to make provision for their own health, what other core responsibilities of functioning adulthood are they likely to forego? Oh, Smith and Jones can still be entrusted to make their own choices about which movie to rent from Netflix, or which breakfast cereal to eat. For the moment. But you’d be surprised how quickly the “right” to health care elides into the government’s right to tell you how to live in order to access that health care. A government-directed medical system can be used to justify almost any restraint on freedom: After all, if the state undertakes to cure you, it surely has an interest in preventing you needing treatment in the first place – or declining to treat you if your persist in your deviancy