16th
Do we devalue the poor?
Peter Singer, utilitarian philosopher and bioethicist, wrote in “Why We Must Ration Health Care” (New York Times, 7/15/09) -
“[I]f the stories of Bruce Hardy and Jack Rosser lead us to think badly of the British system of rationing health care, we should remind ourselves that the U.S. system also results in people going without life-saving treatment — it just does so less visibly…That’s rationing too, by ability to pay.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19healthcare-t.html
So instead of denying expensive care to people who are gravely ill and might only get a miserable few more months of life, our system denies care to those who cannot pay. If we are willing to allocate more money for less added life for a rich person, doesn’t this mean that our system inherently devalues the life of a poor person?
i.e. Let’s say the amount of money spent on extending the life of a rich person (who is able to pay) by 3 months, while that same amount of money would extend the life of a poor person by a year. (The real ratio is probably more exaggerated, as the amount spent on an expensive, life-extending treatment often lead to decades of added life for a healthy but poor person.) Therefore, it takes 4 times as much to pay for a year in the rich person’s life as it does for a poor person. As you see, we’ve just indirectly concluded that the life of the rich is 4 times more valuable than the poor.
