On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 08:58:49PM -0600, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: > At 09:19 PM 1/9/03 -0500, Erik Reuter wrote: > >On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 07:40:37PM -0600, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: > > > >> just mean "Mama/Papa is 70+ and though s/he was in good health for a > >> person of that age before the heart attack, someone of that age can't > >> make any useful (financial) contribution to society, so we might as > >> well let them die and 'decrease the surplus population'." > > > >What kind of reason is that? How about, "there's someone over there who > >needs us and who DOES have a chance of having a long, healthy life if we > >can save her now" > > In the given scenario, both can be saved.
Do you think that in most medical cases, it is reasonably possible to save every patient? > However, bypass surgery costs something like $40K (maybe more). Is > it possible that, either now or in the future, insurance providers > (private or Medicare) will decide that no 70-year-old's life is worth > $40K, so they will not approve a doctor's request for surgery on any > patient that age, regardless of their prospects for surviving the > surgery, recovering, and living many more years in good health? I can't see anyone making the decision that way. My impression was that if a decision has to be made, it is not made so much (at all?) on whether a person is "good" or their exact age, but puts a lot of emphasis on whether the person can be saved and have the possibility of living a long healthy life or whether the person is likely to die soon even if the treatment succeeds, or whether the person is likely to require continuous treatment for the rest of their lives to stay alive. > At what point, if any, may someone in a position to make the final > decision on whether or not a patient gets treatment say, "Yes, that > patient _could_ be saved, but his/her life is not worth the amount it > will cost to save him/her"? That is a reasonable and practical question for a medical provider with limited resources to ask, for some definition of "life is not worth". We, as a society, need to decide how to best allocate medical resources. I haven't heard about any decisions that I thought were made incorrectly. In most cases I've heard about, the decision was made on a practical level, similar to what I discussed above. How do you think the decisions should be made? > And if there's any possibility of such a determination being made, how > can the family be sure that when the doctor says "There's nothing we > can do," s/he really means "There is nothing medical we can do to save > Mama/Papa," and not "We could save Mama/Papa, but the bean counters > have decreed that Mama/Papa is not worth saving"? You can never be 100% sure. But that goes for most things in life. You can go for 2nd or 3rd opinions, go to the library and read everything you can find, search the web for other people in similar situations, etc. -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
