http://www.slate.com/...
This is what made my jaw start to drop...
Tirhas Habtegiris, a 27-year-old terminal cancer patient at Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Texas, was removed from her ventilator last month because she couldn't pay her medical bills. The hospital gave Ms. Habtegiris' family 10 days' notice, and then, with the bills still unpaid, withdrew her life support on the 11th day. It took Ms. Habtegiris about 15 minutes to die.
Bloggers, most prominently "YucatanMan" at Daily Kos, are appalled because "economic considerations," as opposed to what the bloggers call "compassion," drove the decision to unplug Ms. Habtegiris. I conclude that YucatanMan either doesn't understand what an economic consideration is or doesn't understand what compassion is, because in fact the two are not in conflict.
There's more..
I must conclude, having read this article, that this guy (Steven E. Landsburg) is STILL drunk from New Year's celebrations. Where this rant came from I do NOT understand!
Is this the quality of Slate's contributors??? Mr. Landsburg wanders through a morass of postulating that ventilator insurance (huh?) costs $75 and that poor folks should be offered the choice of choosing ventilator insurance or cash. If they choose cash, then they obviously didn't value having a ventilator...he further believes that the victim here would have chosen cash or some fancy doodad and then "felt bad about it later" when she got sick.
As I said, the first block quote item made my jaw start to drop...THIS is the money quote:
Now let me remind you what "compassion" means. According to Merriam-Webster Online (which, by virtue of being online, really ought to be easily accessible to bloggers), compassion is the "sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it." By that definition, there is nothing particularly compassionate about giving ventilator insurance to a person who really feels a more urgent need for milk or eggs. One might even say that choosing to ignore the major sources of others' distress is precisely the opposite of sympathetic consciousness.
(..snip..)
Tirhas Habtegris would probably have taken the cash. Then she'd have gotten sick and regretted her decision. And then we as a society would have been in exactly the same position we were in last week--deciding whether to foot the bill to keep Ms. Habtegris alive a little longer.
I'm speechless...for once...I have no way to comprehend what this guy is smoking! Anybody else know if this guy is a REGULAR on Slate?!