Sunday, August 30, 2009

Some of what's wrong with Obamacare underpinnings

http://tinyurl.com/nzbauf
Obama's Health Rationer-in-Chief White House health-care adviser Ezekiel Emanuel blames the Hippocratic Oath for the 'overuse' of medical care. By BETSY MCCAUGHEY
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There are logical, consistency, and philosophical objections to Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel's arguments, however plausible they might sound to some./
Logically, his argument that ageist discrimination, according to his "complete lives system", "...is not invidious" has a simple consequence that would put his scheme far into the future. Even accepting his premise, it is a change of the rules midstream and unfair to invoke this for less than a complete life cycle. That is, logic would require that, to be non-invidious, such a system would have to start only with those being born tomorrow. Dr. Emanuel's argument in favor of teenagers over babies even falls into the "sunk cost" fallacy. He'd do better to argue against the costs (and poor life-cycle results) of extravagant neo-natalist medicine and the fact that it skews our seemingly poor comparative statistics on infant mortality./
Dr. Emanuel might argue that the state comes before the individual and that the utilitarian "good of the greatest number" should prevail. While he can only speak for (a small subset of) the medical profession, his principles if valid should also apply to the many lawyers in this administration and Congress. If he claims doctors sometimes lie to insurance companies on behalf of their patients, what about lawyers who are legally entitled to lie on behalf of their clients to the public ( and even, in making their own attestations, to courts )? Changing the Hippocratic Oath would be profound but not as profound as changing the Code of Professional Conduct for lawyers.The supposed societal merit of tort lawyers pushing for extravagant punitive damages is gainsaid by the result not going to society but, rather, to individual plaintiffs with 30-40% going to the lawyers themselves./
The whole idea of communitarian principles requiring that resources go to the benefit of the state as a whole ( and its perpetuation ) at the expense of the individual is very unAmerican. As Prof. Peter Singer, another "ethicist" along the lines of Dr.Emanuel, admitted ( indeed, declaimed ) in a NY Times Magazine piece, their views are at odds with Judeo-Christian morality. According to their principles, we would hardly countenance expensive searches for missing skiers, crashed airplane passengers, etc, often where the statistical probability indicates loss of life in the effort. We should require our military to leave fallen comrades on the battlefield and add cost-effectiveness to triage of the wounded.. At least Dr. Emanuel seems concerned for the polity of people over the individual; other ethicists seem to elevate animals and the inanimate planet over people.

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