Death Care Is Cheaper than Health Care

I recently reported that some old, ugly and perverted forms of medicine are on their way back into our health care system. While health care as we know it is entirely devoted to curing people and saving their lives, there is a dark side to medicine that has been used for much more sinister purposes. Under Nazi Germany one of those practices, called eugenics, was elevated to the same level as normal health care, with the purpose of cleansing the German population from individuals whose lives, according to government, were unworthy of living.

I also reported that…

Today the practice of eugenics has taken a more "polished" form. What the Nazis called Lebensunwertes Leben, a life unworthy of living, has been replaced by a practice in modern, tax-paid health care called Haushaltsunwertes Leben. A life unworthy of government funding.

This modern form of eugenics has been labeled "palliative care" or euthanasia. It is already established in nations with entirely socialized health care systems, such as Sweden, Belgium and at least one Canadian province.

The British National Health Service provides an expanded version of this modern form of death care. When a doctor suggests that a child's life is no longer worth living, and the child's parents accept the doctor's opinion, tax-paid hospitals isolate the children and let them starve and dehydrate to death. It can take up to eleven days for the children to die.

So far, American physicians have been very reluctant to put on these black coats of death care. However, that may be about to change. On Thursday, September 19 the New York Times reported on a new government-sponsored report called "Dying in America":

The country's system for handling end-of-life care is largely broken and should be overhauled at almost every level, a national panel concluded in a report released on Wednesday. The 21-member nonpartisan committee, appointed by the Institute of Medicine, the independent research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, called for sweeping change. "The bottom line is the health care system is poorly designed to meet the needs of patients near the end of life," said David M. Walker, a Republican and a former United States comptroller general, who was a chairman of the panel.

The United States is an exception to most other industrialized nations in that tax money is – officially – not supposed to fund abortions. The main reason for this is that the idea of life as having intrinsic value is very deeply rooted in American culture. By the same token, the concept of euthanasia is alien to our idea of a dignified society.

However, as government's interest in health care increases, both these forms of death care will rise to higher prominence in the public policy debate. The reason is as simple as it is cynical. When government pays for health care, tax revenues will always fall short of what government needs to honor all its health care promises. To reduce costs over time, government has an interest in reducing the number of babies that are born with medical conditions requiring future health care.

Similarly, government has an interest in reducing the number of elderly who will live long enough to require expensive health care.

Or, as explained in the aforementioned New York Times article:

"The current system is geared towards doing more, more, more, and that system by definition is not necessarily consistent with what patients want, and is also more costly." … The panel, which included doctors, nurses, insurers, religious leaders, lawyers and experts on aging, said Medicare and other insurers should create financial incentives for health care providers to have continuing conversations with patients on advance care planning, possibly starting as early as major teenage milestones like getting a driver's license or going to college. It called for a "major reorientation and restructuring of Medicare, Medicaid and other health care delivery programs" and the elimination of "perverse financial incentives" that encourage expensive hospital procedures… The 507-page report, "Dying in America," said its recommendations would improve the quality of care and better satisfy more patients and families. It also said the changes would produce significant savings that would help make health care more affordable.

And in order to make health care more affordable, government deprives life of its intrinsic value. The more government gets involved in health care, the more lives will be deemed unworthy of the government budget.

Death care is cheaper than health care.