30 December 2010
The Life of Death Panels
The debate about “death panels” rages on because it is being conducted by interested parties, like the government and its “independent commissions” who have or influence the power to tax, the medical profession that serves the wishes of its individual clients, and legal advocates, including David B. Rivkin Jr. and Elizabeth Price Foley in the December 30, 2010 Wall Street Journal. Rivkin and Foley blame the FDA for banning the prescription of an expensive drug, Avastin, for the purpose merely of briefly extending and palliating the final months of a terminal breast cancer victim. This is one of the reasons why the American health care system threatens to bankrupt the country. It should not upset us when the FDA judges that the individual benefit of using a costly drug in place of other palliative procedures to avoid “a swifter and less dignified death” is outweighed by adverse side effects and the likely greater epidemiological result of devoting some of our limited resources to serving the medical welfare of the public at large.
Rivkin and Foley fail to come up with a solution to the conundrum the Obama administration finds itself in with costs skyrocketing and individuals demanding entitlement to everlasting lives. While the FDA’s ruling on Avastin actually constitutes the imposition of beneficiary cost-sharing that they prescribe—100% cost-sharing—it will generate nothing but political resistance until Americans admit that their passage on this earth is only transitory.
Convincing them of that won’t be done by any of the voices that argue for health reform now. It must be done by a truly independent voice, uncompromised by its political or commercial stake in the outcome of the debate. Trial lawyers, elected officials, health care providers, all must motivate and defer to real opinion leaders—philosophers, community organizers, teachers, preachers, writers, entertainers—for modifying people’s expectations about their physical existence. Life will inescapably end and we’d better stop blaming anyone else for it and making them pay for failing to correct it.
The debate about “death panels” rages on because it is being conducted by interested parties, like the government and its “independent commissions” who have or influence the power to tax, the medical profession that serves the wishes of its individual clients, and legal advocates, including David B. Rivkin Jr. and Elizabeth Price Foley in the December 30, 2010 Wall Street Journal. Rivkin and Foley blame the FDA for banning the prescription of an expensive drug, Avastin, for the purpose merely of briefly extending and palliating the final months of a terminal breast cancer victim. This is one of the reasons why the American health care system threatens to bankrupt the country. It should not upset us when the FDA judges that the individual benefit of using a costly drug in place of other palliative procedures to avoid “a swifter and less dignified death” is outweighed by adverse side effects and the likely greater epidemiological result of devoting some of our limited resources to serving the medical welfare of the public at large.
Rivkin and Foley fail to come up with a solution to the conundrum the Obama administration finds itself in with costs skyrocketing and individuals demanding entitlement to everlasting lives. While the FDA’s ruling on Avastin actually constitutes the imposition of beneficiary cost-sharing that they prescribe—100% cost-sharing—it will generate nothing but political resistance until Americans admit that their passage on this earth is only transitory.
Convincing them of that won’t be done by any of the voices that argue for health reform now. It must be done by a truly independent voice, uncompromised by its political or commercial stake in the outcome of the debate. Trial lawyers, elected officials, health care providers, all must motivate and defer to real opinion leaders—philosophers, community organizers, teachers, preachers, writers, entertainers—for modifying people’s expectations about their physical existence. Life will inescapably end and we’d better stop blaming anyone else for it and making them pay for failing to correct it.
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