I am way too opinionated to even consider having a dialog on this, but I do know from working as a Medicaid auditor, this state and every other state, has many people in the condition described above. Many are 100% bed ridden and unresponsive in any way. Their care is paid for by our tax dollars, state and federal. More than 25 years ago these people cost us more than$300 per day. I have no idea what the expense is now but am sure that in Washington State alone the cost is in the millions per year. The decision is deeply personal but the result is often a child abandoned to intensive lifelong care at government expense. The cost is enormous, the answer to the problem imponderable.

Seems a lot of you are missing the point.

What about saving a life...just because...


IT'S THE RIGHT THING TO DO?

It is not about dollars, it is about our humanity and our right to have a chance for life. You don't let people die because of money. The system we have now is not the greatest and could use help, but it still works.

ISO

ISO,

If you can see past the blinding glow of the halo you've placed around your head, you'd realize that we all want to save lives, lots of them.

The difference is that you want to throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at 19 week premature babies who are unlikely to survive, much less lead long healthy lives. The rest of us want to take that same money and save geometrically more lives by providing preventive and regular care for the working poor in our country.

Or is it only the RIGHT THING TO DO if it is for 19 weeks pemature babies?

I'm starting to think that this thread should be the one titled "The Joke Thread"...

Fish on...

Todd

That's about as far from reality as you can get. One small example, if you need a liver transplant a panel gives you points for different criteria. Financial resources is one of the big factors in the point system. Also, if you are rich you can fly to an area that has a shorter waiting list for a liver. That's what that Apple executive Jobs did.

Why do you think the insurance corps deny experimental procedures that might save a life. Money.

If it was only about saving lives we would soon be spending the whole GNP on health care.

The question is whether to spend the money on a hopeless premature baby , extending the life of a 90 year old cancer patient a few more weeks or on people who can have long term benefit. There is and never will be a health care system that is not making these decisions in one form or another. What we have in this country is NOT WORKING for many people. Do you even have a clue as to how many bankruptcies are caused by medical expenses? Get sick and lose everything....ya that sure works.

OK Row--

This time the baby is Mexican.

The mother just now crossed the border and crapped it out at the nearest US hospital.

It's now a "Natural Born United States Citizen."

Now how do you feel about it?

Yeah that's what I thought, dumfuk.

He's gone over the edge, now ANYTHING you say will be contsrued
as Obamabashing and will be addressed as such.......TFF!!!!

Now contemplate KK's kid...the mother is Nubian............never mind.

OK. Then you get the job of telling the Mothers of those babies that you decided they were too expensive and as such had to die.

Fair enough?

MB

I'll tell them.


Fair enough?

Okay, I'll split the work with Dan it sounds like. Someone has to do it, might as well be us.

I'll bet there are a lot a people unafraid to man-up when need be.

I'd rather tell a mother we had to let her little one go than tell her that we spent every penny she had to keep the child alive for who-knows-how-long, so now she can raise it and the rest of her family while bankrupt and destitute.

RvW,

Had I known you were incapable of having a rational discussion about this subject I would not have asked you how you would do it. As it was, you didn't answer the question but veered off track. Deflection is common among folks who can't or won't discuss the very topic they raised.

Irish Rogue qued this up perfectly. It always is a benefit:cost analysis. It has to be as long as dollars are scarce, which they always are, and needs are great, which they always are. The most cost effective treatments will occur, and the treatments that are not won't. That's the way it always has been; that's the way it is now; and that's the way it will be, regardless of health care reform, Obama, RvW, or whatever.

Count me in to join IR and Dan S. to tell anyone the obvious if they cannot contain their emotions sufficiently for rational discussion.

Wow, Todd's right; this has become the joke thread. Maybe the health care debate is only impossible because so many Americans can only debate with their emotions instead of rational thought. Obama and socialism aren't even a convenient smokescreen.

Sg

Crucial point here - insurance corps are withholding OUR money that we paid in, yet they treat it like THEIR money.

Nobody wants to deliver news like that.............but it's part of the deal.

My dad used to talk about how you deliver the uncomfortable news that someone has cancer, and won't be around for long. He said it was about the hardest part of his job to deliver news nobody ever wanted to hear.

But let's be honest...........news like this is delivered every day. Nobody WANTS to do it, but they HAVE TO do it.

And rationalize care..or they the same ?

Depends on if you mean "Ration" (opposition speak) or "Rationalize" which I don't undertsand in this context.

Rationing is life. We have limited resources, anyone who tells you things aren't already rationed is full of shite. It's rationed by your doctor and by your insurance company. Both have competing profit interests, incidentally, in today's system.

"Crucial point here - insurance corps are withholding OUR money that we paid in, yet they treat it like THEIR money."

Never forget that insurance companies are in the business of collecting premiums, not paying claims.

boy howdy! that's business.....

That's why I can't figure out for the life of me WHY the right-wing extremists defend them so adamantly???