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Originally Posted by mcsluggo
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My boyfriend sent me this article and I thought he had sent it to me because I've been researching a bunch of things for a presentation I am doing on assisted suicide for one of my classes. Anyway, reading it again, I interpreted some things a little differently than I had before.
First, I have to say that I'm one of the few democrats that doesn't want this healthcare bill to pass and this article pretty much gives a reason why I don't want it to pass. These people had a bill of $600K plus to keep this guy alive for TWO years. Two. Obviously a lot of people have had to absorb that cost for this one guy to stay alive for those two years. What happens when this healthcare thing passes? Are we gonna have to do that with everyone who is terminally ill? My thinking on this may be wrong because I'm not fully understanding what is all in this healthcare bill.
Second, I may get a lot of crap for this, but I find it extremely selfish of the family to keep doing all of this stuff to keep him alive as long as they could KNOWING that he was going to die anyway. It's a completely different story if there was an actual chance this guy would survive. I guess I'm just not sure that $600K was really worth him having to go through all of these treatments and new drugs and having the hospitals absorb a lot of these costs just because the family couldn't let go. That is selfish.
Also, I'd like to add, for $600,000 all of these people managed to keep this guy alive for two years. What did he do for most of those two years? Stay in hospitals, go for tests, be a guinea pig for new drugs, go for some more tests.... doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. How is that living?
I know we all have to pay for a lot of people now who don't have insurance, but I really feel that this healthcare bill is going to open a lot of flood gates and it's not going to be pretty. I really don't see how this can help a nation of some 300 million people. This isn't England or Canada who have like 60 million, if that. We have 300 MILLION people. We have a huge obesity problem. I certainly don't want to have to help pay for the fatass who can't stop eating McDonalds. As mean as it sounds, I certainly don't want to have to help pay for terminally ill people to live an extra two years either.
Just so I don't sound like I'm an evil person, my dad died when I was 11. He had a heart attack at work, and since he worked in a warehouse it took about 5 minutes for someone to reach him in order to do CPR. By this time he was already brain dead. When I saw him in the hospital that night, he couldn't talk, move anything- basically he was already gone. Thankfully he passed on his own the next morning. I think about what if he had survived and ended up being in a vegatative state for the rest of his life. We certainly couldn't have afforded all of the medical costs that comes with that. I wouldn't expect the rest of the nation to help pay for someone they don't even know.
I guess I just have a bad feeling about this. I think that there needs to some kind of overhaul on healthcare, just not this.