[LUCKY] SEVERSON: Dr. Weinberg says the decisions about the ethics of distributive justice for society as a whole are often much more difficult when the doctor is meeting with a patient one-on-one.
DR. [GLORIA] WEINBERG: The health care dollars, an inordinate amount, go to taking care of people in the last 6 months of their lives. But how do you know when those last 6 months are? You have a person who has worked all their life, paid taxes, done very well, and now they are 80, and they have a heart attack. That may be the person who lives 10 or 15 more years. Are we going to say no just because of age? That’s a very, very slippery slope.
SEVERSON: There is a huge ethical discussion about who should make these end-of-life decisions””the patient, the family, doctors, the government? Brian Keeley says some decisions are easier to make. For instance, Medicare should only reimburse for treatments and drugs that are known to work.
KEELEY: It ought to be evidence-based. If something is proven not to work, I don’t think the federal government ought to be paying for it. I don’t think anybody ought to be paying for it, except for the private patient.
SEVERSON: Dr. Weinberg says too many patients receive expensive treatments and surgery in their final years that very likely won’t prolong their life.
The national health care situation is based upon the needs of human beings and the availabiulity of resources; and no utopian solution, no grand design of the human mind, no ‘top down’ dictatorial control of resource asvailability/cost is going to work.
At best, monolitihic systems, designed by human beings, will work imperfectly and quite often disastrously.
Congress seems unwilling to look at how and where health care is working well and seems bent on dramatizing and over emphasizing situations, some of which are contrived, where health care is not working well or is absent.
Congress also, because a majority rules, is acting in a dictatorial manner that is intentionally designed to prevent open and rational debate that can be followed by the American people. This smacks of dictatorial socialism where the debates of the National Socialist controlled Reichstag and the Soviet Party Congresses were merely show case events that provided a ‘rubber stamp approval’ of the decisions of a small minority of government officials.
The issue of national health care is going to, one way or the other, have enormous and possibly disastrous consequences for the American people. Therefore, it is crucial that national health care be debated publicly and with full the participation of all elected members of Congress before any proposed health care law is put up for a vote.