President Obama's New "Regulatory Czar" a Believer in "Quality of Life" Health Care
This could be bad. Cass R. Sunstein, just appointed by President Obama to be "regulatory czar," is a big "quality of life" guy in determining the cost/benefit ratio of government regulations. This is the executive summary of a paper he wrote back in 2003 for the Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, entitled "Lives, Life-Years, and Willingness to Pay." From the paper:
In protecting safety, health, and the environment, government has increasingly relied on cost-benefit analysis. In undertaking cost-benefit analysis, the government has monetized risks of death through the idea of "value of a statistical life" (VSL), currently assessed at about $6.1 million. Many analysts, however, have suggested that the government should rely instead on the "value of a statistical life year" (VSLY), in a way that would likely result in significantly lower benefits calculations for elderly people, and significantly higher benefits calculations for children. I urge that the government should indeed focus on life-years rather than lives. A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people. The hard question involves not whether to undertake this shift, but how to monetize life-years, and here willingness to pay (WTP) [what one would pay to obtain a good] is generally the place to begin...In fact, a focus on statistical lives is more plausibly a form of illicit discrimination than a focus on life years, because the idea of statistical lives treats the years of older people as worth far more than the years of younger people.The paper dealt broadly with how to measure the cost/benefit aspect of government regulations generally, and illustrates how bureaucrats and their enablers are the real kings now. But that aside, its applicability to regulations in a regime of national health care law are obvious and frightening: If regulatory policy is to be based on granting the lives of elderly people a lesser value, it begs for health care rationing that would be supported by terms such as "value of statistical life year," "willingness to pay"--and other such euphemisms that will no doubt be coined--as bureaucrateze cover for blatant medical discrimination.
Labels: Cass R. Sunstein. Quality of Life Ethic. Regulatory Czar.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 3:56 PM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
This kind of thinking is already in effect. I've seen it, and its result. I don't know how I'm even still able to be walking around after having seen it. And it hasn't happened just once.
It didn't seem right to me when we started having Czars for one thing and another. What is this, Russia? It shows where we're headed, and has been speaking volumes the whole time and no one has spoken up about it.
The only hope is that Obama will continue to freak out the way he's been visibly doing, and disintegrate to such an extent that he's quickly and decisively removed from office via impeachment, and his crew is thrown out with him. He's in over his head, he knows it, and it's obvious that he is and that he knows it. The number of idiots in this country who were willing to elect him is in itself terrifying. We are in worse rough times, overall, even than he is saying the economy is. I've predicted, as have many astrologers, that the U.S. is in for revolution as radical as that which created the nation in the first place the last time Pluto came around to where it is now, in the late eighteenth century, and that the governments of nations elsewhere are as well. If we don't act fast, and drastically, and wake up, and make it a GOOD revolution, we're done for as a nation.
A society is best judged by the respect it has for, and the way it treats, its elderly. If it doesn't respect their wisdom and value, it doesn't have any itself.
We seem automatically to assume that the younger life is more important and valuable, and there is some valid argument there, as it has more future potential, and some religions hold that in a critical childbirth situation the life of the infant takes precedence over that of the mother. But in the last instance the mother feels likewise. In others, there is reason for putting more value on the life of the older person, and if we can't see why, and don't have that kind of respect, we end up with what we've got now.
It's way past the point of could be bad; it IS bad.
I am so much more than a pile of dollars...my first thought on seeing how they calculate worth of life to begin with is, 'Only 6.1 million?' What were Bernie Madoff's assets worth before his bubble burst? I say the minimum statistical worth of a life should be at least what the richest person in the world makes in a year.
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