Health Care in US: a family's perspective

[leegs]

Re: Health Care in US: a family's perspective

Well said!

That is really well said! I took the liberty of posting it in another forum, crediting to 'some guy on an economics forum I read'. I hope you (Jay) don't mind - I'll remove it if you do.

[Raz]

Re: Health Care in US: a family's perspective

From my perspective, when you are in medicine long enough, as a humane and aware individual, you start to realize that there is a time to die. Some may disagree but I don't think they understand suffering. If a suffering patient with no hope for a turnaround, who has the capacity to understand the decision they make, wants to die, so be it. It is the physician's place, as someone who understands disease, to help a patient make educated choices that suit them. That would include living wills. Jack Kevorkian is a brave and enlightened man.

The sage of the Lord said, "Unto everything there is a season; a time to be born, and a time to die". (Ecclesiastes: 3:2)
And I certainly agree with you, Jay - up to a point. I faced extremely difficult and vexing decisions during my mother's final illness in her 83rd year. We couldn't get her off the respirator after minor surgery because her trachea was collapsing. (She suffered half of her life with severe arthritis.) I told the pulmonary specialist that I wanted to help my mother live, but I did not want to force my mother to live. So I do understand and I agree that there is indeed "a time to die".

I do NOT, however, share your view of Kevorkian. I believe him to be a sick and perverted individual who is obssesed with death, and I believe he was justly convicted and imprisoned.
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/prin...cleid=10061507

There is a BIG DIFFERENCE between allowing someone to end their life, even to the point of providing chemicals that allow them to end their own life in a painless way, and actively taking their life - even if they said they wanted to die.
While I have great respect for you and your profession, I am unalterably opposed to any laws allowing that.

[Raz]

Re: Health Care in US: a family's perspective

I'm sure you understand that the free market that we all think we live in is not free at all, but highly regulated and increasingly so. Monopoly powers are on the rise and the barrier to entry for most anything one wants to do is much higher than it has been even in recent the past. We live in a world that we are told is dominated by socialist and capitalist ideologies battling it out in the public, but what is actually true is that our world is being defined by back room power plays that have more to do with a class structure with a very deep divide. This deep divide grows every day, and while the public fights over what the markets "look like", socialist or capitalist, red or blue, liberal or conservative, they are shackled with higher and higher levels of debt, making the class divide greater and greater. Those left and right arguments hide the important issue of the day and that is a massive transfer of wealth upward that has nothing to do with what we think should be argued about in the political arena, and everything to do with the way our monetary system is structured. And it is a silent prison. Much of the disintegration of our mores as a society are due to this process. It is reflected in every area of our economy. Anything that the dollar touches is affected, including medicine. Remember that dollars are created through debt which must be paid back plus interest. Look up and down not left and right.

Well said, Jay. Very well said.