Thursday, July 30, 2009

QALY In Health Care: An Equation For Death

The proposed Obama Health care plan is integrating the QALY system of, harbinger of the Culture of Death, activist Peter Singer. QALY or Quality of Life Years is an equation used to equate the value of each human life to the government. The plan is to use QALY to ration health care, and give "end of life counceling" to elderly every five years regardless of their health status. To not loose any of the moraless ideas of Singer, the following is how he explained the QALY equation in the New York Times

As a first take, we might say that the good achieved by health care is the number of lives saved. But that is too crude. The death of a teenager is a greater tragedy than the death of an 85-year-old, and this should be reflected in our priorities. We can accommodate that difference by calculating the number of life-years saved, rather than simply the number of lives saved. If a teenager can be expected to live another 70 years, saving her life counts as a gain of 70 life-years, whereas if a person of 85 can be expected to live another 5 years, then saving the 85-year-old will count as a gain of only 5 life-years. That suggests that saving one teenager is equivalent to saving 14 85-year-olds.

Singer makes exceptions to his own principles for people of disabilities….

One common method is to describe medical conditions to people — let’s say being
a quadriplegic — and tells them that they can choose between 10 years in that
condition or some smaller number of years without it. If most would prefer, say,
10 years as a quadriplegic to 4 years of nondisabled life, but would choose 6
years of nondisabled life over 10 with quadriplegia, but have difficulty
deciding between 5 years of nondisabled life or 10 years with quadriplegia, then
they are, in effect, assessing life with quadriplegia as half as good as
nondisabled life. (These are hypothetical figures, chosen to keep the math
simple, and not based on any actual surveys.) If that judgment represents a
rough average across the population, we might conclude that restoring to
nondisabled life two people who would otherwise be quadriplegics is equivalent
in value to saving the life of one person, provided the life expectancies of all
involved are similar. . .. . .Some will object that this discriminates against
people with disabilities. If we return to the hypothetical assumption that a
year with quadriplegia is valued at only half as much as a year without it, then
a treatment that extends the lives of people without disabilities will be seen
as providing twice the value of one that extends, for a similar period, the
lives of quadriplegics.

Singer makes a lot of inclusions for his extermination policies. The error of these policies are clearer when you hear the truth; Dr. Ray Dennehy of the University of San Francisco.

The kind of contrast that Singer draws between lives with disabilities and lives
without them collides with the doctrine of natural rights that forms the bedrock
of our democracy. The basis of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is
human nature, and a disabled person has not lost that nature. To borrow from the
philosopher, Yves R. Simon, it is just as much an act of murder to kill a sickly
man as a healthy one; it is just as much an act of murder to kill a colored man
as a white man; it is just as much an act of murder to kill a poor man as a rich
man; it is just as much an act of murder to kill a child in its mother's womb as
a human adult.



Catholic Femina Speaks: The American people have so much information available to them, that no one can claim ignorance. The truth of the Obama health care has been printed and debated. It is hard to believe our government would desire such atrocities to life, but the truth of the matter is this life needs to be valued. We teach our children that life has intrinsic worth, now we must show this to our government. Call and peacefully protest this outrage to life.

“A persons a person no matter how small.”- Dr. Suess


No comments:

Post a Comment