Death Panels, Anyone?

Dehumanising and Unjust

When Sarah Palin came out criticising President Obama's socialising of the health system in the United States, saying the system would set up "death panels" of bureaucrats deciding who lived and who died she was dumped on from a great height. 

She was right, prophetically so.  But this gift did not require a special prophetic gift--only some clear thinking on her part.  Health care resources and services, like everything else in this life, are not infinite.  They are limited.  Therefore, rationing of some sort is inevitable.  In a socialised heath care system the government does the rationing.  It is the government which will ultimately decide--bureaucratically--who gets treatment and who does not.  Put bluntly that makes the government a convener of death panels--and that is the fundamental objection, not to rationing per se which in one form or another is inevitable and necessary.   

Fast forward just  a few short months.  HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius has become a one man death panel.  This from Politico.

Kathleen Sebelius at center of storm over child’s lung transplant

The plight of a dying 10-year-old girl in urgent need of a lung transplant has been taken up by some GOP lawmakers, and it’s shining a light on what critics say is a questionable policy that puts children further down the waiting list.

The family of the Pennsylvania girl, Sarah Murnaghan, has garnered the media spotlight, on cable news and in other outlets. And some GOP congressmen have joined the fray, quite literally “begging” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to intervene and save the girl’s life. Both Pennsylvania senators — a Democrat and a Republican — have also written on the child’s behalf. “I’m begging you,” Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.) told Sebelius at a House hearing Tuesday morning, asking her to suspend the transplant rules until they can be revisited. “Sarah has three to five weeks to live. Time is running out.” The child has cystic fibrosis.

At the hearing, Sebelius called the situation “agonizing” and said she had talked to the girl’s mother. She has ordered a review of the policy, which she acknowledged would take too long to have any impact on this girl’s situation, but said it wasn’t her place to pick and choose transplant recipients.  “I can’t imagine anything worse than one individual getting to pick who lives and who dies,” she said. Sebelius said putting Sarah next in line would disadvantage other young people who have also been waiting for transplants — including three in the same area. Helping one child could possibly hurt another.

Sounds like a death panel to me.  But, when the death panel consists of just one it becomes personal and agonising.  We feel your pain, Kathleen.  That's why socialised medicine always opts for impersonal rules, regulations, panels--meeting in back rooms and making up endless impersonal rules and regulations to ration the supply of government funded healthcare.  Somehow that removes personal responsibility.  Except that it does not.  For when the government takes responsibility for rationing health care, the government and its functionaries are responsible for life and death.  The impersonality of it does not obviate the personal moral guilt and accountability Sibelius is now confronting.

One of the inevitable evils of government rationing of health care is that government decisions will, in the end, become politicised and ideological--as in, "you can get government funded health care if you give up protesting outside Planned Parenthood's abortion clinics".  Sound far fetched?  Actually, not lately, it doesn't.

Sarah Palin was bang on.  She was right.  She is now being demonstrably proven right.  We wish it were not so, but right back then, we knew any such a wish would prove forlorn.  In a finite world, rationing is inevitable.  Government rationing of health will always be dehumanising and unjust, the favouring of the few over the many.