Libthink at its worst: 'Why We Must Ration Healthcare'

Here's the early rationale and excuse for what's surely on the way with Obamacare:"Healthcare rationing is good for you. And you will like it!"

How offensive is this?

"Rationing health care means getting value for the billions we are spending by setting limits on which treatments should be paid for from the public purse. If we ration we won’t be writing blank checks to pharmaceutical companies for their patented drugs, nor paying for whatever procedures doctors choose to recommend. When public funds subsidize health care or provide it directly, it is crazy not to try to get value for money. The debate over health care reform in the United States should start from the premise that some form of health care rationing is both inescapable and desirable."

Or this?

"Governments implicitly place a dollar value on a human life when they decide how much is to be spent on health care programs and how much on other public goods that are not directed toward saving lives. The task of health care bureaucrats is then to get the best value for the resources they have been allocated. It is the familiar comparative exercise of getting the most bang for your buck."

And this:

"As a first take, we might say that the good achieved by health care is the number of lives saved. But that is too crude. The death of a teenager is a greater tragedy than the death of an 85-year-old, and this should be reflected in our priorities. We can accommodate that difference by calculating the number of life-years saved, rather than simply the number of lives saved. If a teenager can be expected to live another 70 years, saving her life counts as a gain of 70 life-years, whereas if a person of 85 can be expected to live another 5 years, then saving the 85-year-old will count as a gain of only 5 life-years."

We all know the low value roch-et scientist Usual Suspects place on life from their attitudes on completely unfettered abortion rights, but what singer advocates is one step away from a Final Solution mentality toward the elderly, disabled, and others who just don't measure up to some quality of life excuse for rationing.

More on Singer's value system that rejects sanctity of life for his spurious "quality of life" standards:

"The new tradition that Singer welcomes is founded on a 'quality-of-life' ethic. It allegedly replaces the outgoing morality that is based on the 'sanctity-of-life.'

Wesley J. Smith states that Rethinking Life and Death can fairly be called the Mein Kampf of the euthanasia movement, in that it drops many of the euphemisms common to pro-euthanasia writing and acknowledges euthanasia for what it is: killing.

A disability advocacy group that calls itself 'Not Dead Yet' has fiercely objected to Singer's views on euthanasia. Some refer to him as 'Professor Death.' Others have gone as far as to liken him to Josef Mengele. Troy McClure, an advocate for the disabled, calls him 'the most dangerous man in the world today.' "

Sorry, Mr. McClure. I'm afraid that title now belongs to Barack Obama.

There's more:

"He finds notions of 'sanctity-of-life,' 'dignity,' 'created in the image of God,' and so on to be spurious.

'Fine phrases,' he says, 'are the last resource of those who have run out of argument.' He also sees no moral or philosophical significance to traditional teens such as 'being,' 'nature' and 'essence.' He takes pride in being a modern philosopher who has cast off such 'metaphysical and religious shackles.' "

And finally, the absolute worst:

"According to this avant garde thinker, unborn babies or neonates, lacking the requisite consciousness to qualify as persons, have less right to continue to live than an adult gorilla. By the same token, a suffering or disabled child would have a weaker claim not to be killed than a mature pig. Singer writes, in Rethinking Life and Death:

Human babies are not born self-aware or capable of grasping their lives over time. They are not persons. Hence their lives would seem to be no more worthy of protection that the life of a fetus.

And writing specifically about Down syndrome babies, he advocates trading a disabled or defective child (one who is apparently doomed to too much suffering) for one who has better prospects for happiness:

'We may not want a child to start on life's uncertain voyage if the prospects arc clouded. When this can be known at a very early stage in the voyage, we may still have a chance to make a fresh start. This means detaching ourselves from the infant who has been born, cutting ourselves free before the ties that have already begun to bind us to our child have become irresistible. Instead of going forward and putting all our effort into making the best of the situation, we can still say no, and start again from the beginning.' "

And THAT is the sort of thing that passes for "mainstream thought" among "progressives", and in the Obamanation these days.

May God have mercy upon us for allowing these things to come to pass!

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