For every advance in medical science, there is a corresponding devolution in the idea of sanctity of life — particularly when getting old and terminally sick fuckers to believe they have a “duty to die” rather hamfistedly hides the fact that your malign bureaucratic scheme to control the populace through government distributed health care was born in fail, and can only really exist if it actively kills off enough people to stay at least plausibly sustainable, ever-increasing wait times and deteriorating care notwithstanding.
Here’s my idea: we begin treating those who wish to control and manipulate the market for personal gains in power and control as if they have a terminal illness — or better, as the mass-murderers history has shown them capable of being — and we make the case that they have so little to offer an enlightened, free society that it is they who have a duty to die.
Or else move to one of the sophisticated social democratic shitholes they’re constantly trying to turn the United States into and leave the rest of us alone.
Because some of us believe that we have every right to live, to extend life, and that no bureaucrat feeding out of the public trough should have any say in the matter whatever — including the new class of medical bureaucrats that inevitably rise and spread like bindweed in those fresh new fields of socialized medicine nirvana.
(h/t geoffb)
“Hi Republican, I’m a 52er and I’m here to extend the hand of tolerance and understanding and not get in your wingnut face now that Teh Won finally walks among men. Which best entails, I admit, leaving your once free constitutional republic on my way to our progressive Atlantis so as to best tolerate and understand your kind.”
No? Then how was it ever rational to be a 52er and not leave at once?
If one accepts their premise — that “society” must provide free health care to all — then yes, they set themselves up with quite a sticky little problem. Obviously, society only has “so much” of other-people’s-money to spend, and if they want to maximize the illusion of all-you-can-eat health care, they’re going to need to make some tough “well, yeah, but not that much, gramps!” decisions.
Besides, what petty bureaucrat wouldn’t want the Power to Decide Who Lives and Who Dies? As rushes go, it beats the hell out of dicking around with zoning issues, y’know.
But like so many progressive ideas (all of them, quite possibly), they’ve set themselves up with an unsolvable dilemma (*) by virtue of a false premise. If you decide/remember that it is not society’s role to provide free shit to people, the problem goes away. Let people spend as much money as they want (and, crucially, have) during their terminal phase.
If people were on the hook for their own decisions, rather than spending a seemingly-infinite pile of someone-else’s money, they’d make different decisions. Presented with the “here’s the deal: we can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars prolonging your life, but you’re still dying in 6 months” scenario, I’ve no doubt that many would say “Ohh, 6 more months of lying in a hospital bed with tubes sticking in me, watching the Game Show Network, and the pricetag for that is merely bankrupting my surviving family and destroying everything that I’ve worked for all my life? Eh, no thanks, hand me a exceedingly large pile of morphine.”
And if they don’t, and take the “no, I’m going to cling to what’s left of my life using every cent I can get my hands on” approach — well, whatever, it’s still their choice and their money.
It’s none of “society’s” god-damned business.
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* Assuming that needing to make “tough” decisions about who lives and dies is a problem in the first place, and not the desired goal. And you know what they say about assuming things…
Why wait till they get old and sick when you know it will happen evetually. Turn 30, you have had your chance to breed the little ones the State will raise up. It’s all downhill now since you have served your only purpose to the State. Now get on the Carousel citizen.
I’ve been trying to train friends and family to mentally insert “crappy” anyplace they see a supposed right to something.
“People have a right to (crappy) housing.”
“Every citizen has the right to put (crappy) food on his table for his family.”
“There is no reason why every American should not have (crappy) health care provided to him.”
It helps bring reality back to the arguments.
Squid, I keep urging people read Hobbes when they see the word right, but it hasn’t seemed to be an effective suggestion, mostly as foks prefer to refer as source to an act of God conferring. Seems to be enough for most folks, all taken in all, and any details take the hindmost.
You have a right to bear (crappy) arms.
Yep, that works.
If you’re expecting the State to provide you with “free” firearms, you’re going to get the same crap they provide in every other aspect of life, Slart.
Apropos of nothing, has anyone else seen this dishonest piece of crappy? If you own a medical clinic, some of whose patients get medicare payments, that’s exactly the same as if you were enjoying medicare support yourself.
Logic. No longer for breakfast.
I actually wasn’t going there, Squid. Just noting that you do, in fact, have the right to bear crappy arms. For now, anyway.
Slart, that Bachmann story got some play around here last week. The most effective question I heard was, “Can you imagine the shitstorm that would rain down if Dr. Bachmann had turned away Medicare patients?”
Oh. I was sucked into, I dunno, at least two major work emergencies last week, so I missed it.
The number of empty beer bottles & cans in my recycle bin may just have hit a record high, is how glad I am to have last week behind me.
How much of a dishonest twat is that Sarah Jones person, though?
Me thinks “rights” need to be properly associated with “responsibilities” whenever anyone claims a “right”.
For instance, a right to bear arms comes with the responsibility of any damage such a thing can do.
The right to liberty comes with the responsibility to be self reliant.
The right to medical care comes with the responsibility to fucking die already when you become a drag on the system.
The problem these days is everyone talks about rights, but then evades responsibility like the plague.
There is no right to medical care. I believe everyone should have access to medical care, but they need to have prepared to pay for it somehow. Saying it’s a right means that someone else is required to provide it, because medical care does not exist in a vacuum. If you get it, someone else has to provide it. Actual rights don’t require action from anyone else.
I’ve been drinking.
These days, who isn’t?