Dan Minette wrote:
>
> Alberto wrote somewhat humorously but somewhat seriously.
>
Well, you know, sometimes a (few lines) joke has more
impact than a lengthty post quoting facts :-)
>
>> The problem is: I suspect whenever health care policies
>> exist. Either if they are controlled by evil baby
>> eating capitalists and their hordes of lawyers, or by
>> bureaucratic g*vernments that think that one million
>> deaths is just statistics.
>
> My brother-in-law told me about a decade ago that there
> were cases where he personally coded "brought back from
> a stopped heart" a patient on a daily basis. We have
> the technology to spend hundreds of thousands per person
> per year prolonging their lives. Indeed, IIRC, 40% of
> medical costs in the US are in the last 8 weeks of life.
>
<serious>
I believe you can't treat health care - and everything
related to Life & Death - by the cool methods of
economical [ok, ok] science. Or maybe you can - if
you add *a very important long term*: the fact that
treating human lifes as numbers will add a callousness
to *all* relations in the society that will possibly
be disruptive of the social order in the future.
For example, let's admit as fact what the numbers from
the USA seem to prove: that the crime rate decreases
when abortion is legalized. So, let's imagine that you
are the legislators of another country, and you want to
discuss this. The first approximation would be: "yes,
legalize it, because in 18 years we will have a
lesser crime rate." However, what may happen in 50 or
even 100 years? Will the value attached to human life
become so low that the crime rate will increase again?
</serious>
Alberto Monteiro
