What a relief it was to learn from the President that he has no plans, as he recently put it, to “pull the plug on Grandma.” Cute phrase, isn’t it?
Certainly, it’s easy to be flip if, like the President, one is in one’s forties, in vibrant health – and powerful enough to ensure that loved ones will receive all the treatment they will ever need. But for those who will have to live as regular people under whatever health care regime America eventually adopts, it’s much more difficult to dismiss with a laugh what, exactly, ObamaCare would mean for the sick and the elderly.
I’m thinking of my father, who died just three weeks ago at the age of 83. Hospitalized with an acutely inflamed gall bladder, he was scheduled for surgery the next day before slipping unexpectedly into cardiac arrest.
Under the “reformed” medical system that the President seeks, it’s not pleasant to speculate about what the past few years would have meant for Dad. He was in fragile health; having survived prostate cancer 19 years ago and a triple bypass five years later, he had been undergoing peritoneal dialysis since a health crisis two years ago. There’s no doubt that he fell into the category the President has described as “the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives” who “are accounting for potentially 80% of the total [cost of] health care.” So under ObamaCare, at what point would his life have been deemed to be no longer “worth” saving?
The question matters because notwithstanding his various health challenges, my father had been actively enjoying his friends, his activities, his grandchildren and his life until the day before he died. He had practiced medicine up until the age of 76, just seven years ago. Whatever his health profile looked like on paper – the only way a “cost containment” bureaucrat would ever have encountered it – his life was precious both to him and to those of us who loved him.
That’s why I’m grateful that he wasn’t required by some version of ObamaCare to participate in “end of life counseling,” where someone who knew nothing about him – and couldn’t have cared less – might have tried to convince him that he (and his children) would be better off if he were dead. I’m grateful for the doctors and nurses who tested him, treated him, and succeeded in giving him the few extra years that allowed him to meet his grandchildren. And I’m grateful to the team at the hospital where he died – who worked hard for twenty minutes to save an 83-year-old man without a heartbeat who would, no doubt, have been deemed by any “cost containment” bureaucrat to be consuming far more than his “fair share” of resources.
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