I am so sorry to be critical of the posters here because I agree with those opposed to radically changing a system that needs only tweaking. However,….
there are issues here that are conflated because – Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or Socialist – no one is making the distinction between the inequities of the health care system and permission given by the people to change that inequitable system.
In the clearest issue, the rationing of health care that may lead to the death of an individual has NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO with whether we allow government to make those decisions for us. We would like everything to be neat. If rationing is necessary, then government seems like the correct agency to be permitted to make that decision.
It is not neat at all. Rationing occurs whether we like it or not. However, consciously handing over power to “a board,” “a panel,” “a committee,” or “a government rule book” is an independent decision from rationing health care services. Anyone who does not believe in the independence of these two operating conditions, does not believe in freedom or the agency of the individual.
I for one would rather fight to live or give up on my own rather than feel at the mercies of other “well-meaning” humans. It is simply no one else’s business what I do with my life. If you think otherwise, then perforce you have lost the definitions of murder, death-penalty, man-slaughter, etc. from your vocabulary and world view. You have given up “law” as a moderating influence in human life.
While most people on this blog are unconcerned about Jewish legal issues, a point of Jewish law may aid the American debate on health care reform. The current Orthodox Jewish legal state of affairs – as simply as possible – says that that an active caregiver is not required to offer life-saving measures to a a suffering individual (even if that might prolong his life), but once offered, that same person has no right to remove that very same treatment that he did not have to initiate (which would thereby hasten death of the sufferer by the caregiver’s hand). Period! This legal decision prevents institutionalization of murder.
