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Comment by basedgod | Hacker News Reader

counterpoint. this woman decided to continue with her pregnancy, despite knowing many of the severe medical conditions her child had. why should the state be focused on spending millions of dollars for an infant that never had a shot at life?

health insurance shouldn't mean we'll do whatever it takes to keep somebody alive no matter what

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It sounds like terminating a pregnancy is illegal in Indiana after week 22. One week after the diagnosis.

You're blaming the mother for having to make the most painful decision of her life in a split second after getting what might be the most terrible piece of news in her life. It's really the state that failed her child before and after their birth. This is no fault of the mother's.

Shame.

To OP: @basedgod

> "health insurance shouldn't mean we'll do whatever it takes to keep somebody alive no matter what"

Yeah, I bet when it comes to your own healthcare you'll want your provider to do whatever it takes to keep you alive. Because you think your life matters.

You care so much for the value of your own life but so little for the lives of others. You really do think you are some kind of "god" saying who should live and who should die. You need to look in the mirror and realize that you aren't God.

> I bet when it comes to your own healthcare you'll want your provider to do whatever it takes to keep you alive.

I can't say what I'd do with any certainty (hard to predict what people will do when death comes knocking), but I very much hope that I would choose a comfortable death over a shorter period of time, if the alternative is pain and a low quality of life for a somewhat longer period of time.

Please dispense with the "playing god" rhetoric. There are those who believe that any medical interventions at all constitute "playing god". This has nothing to do with playing god, and everything to do with finding the most humane, compassionate outcomes. I dare say the outcome OP and his wife experienced was neither humane nor compassionate, not toward them or toward their child. And on top of that pain, now the couple may be saddled with medical bills that could destroy them financially.

@kelnos I agree what happened was tragic and can't imagine but my comment was to @basedgod, the OP of this comment thread whose comment was so vulgar and devoid of care of the value of human life that it was flagged into the sun. His rhetoric was that of someone who believes they are a god. The idea that this type of thinking would have any support is terrifying and echoes back to some of history's worst atrocities.

> Yeah, I bet when it comes to your own healthcare you'll want your provider to do whatever it takes to keep you alive. Because you think your life matters.

I don't know. I don't think I would want to be kept alive through a host of crippling medical conditions for a few more months without much hope for a normal life afterwards.

As members of a representative state, we do have the responsibility to decide how people live and die.

People who say they don't want to play god are just saying they're okay with someone else dirtying their hands, because whether in a democracy or an authoritarian government, someone will be making these decisions.

There's a cave in Georgia where they found remains of a human being (or some ancestor) with teeth missing. However, it seems the human survived even after losing teeth, which clearly shows someone else was taking care of him/her, as in chewing the food for them etc., in an environment where losing teeth was akin to death sentence.

We as a species have progressed further than anything else because we do not leave the weak ones behind even when they have no chance. This is what makes us human, not the individualism that modern society promotes.

(Edit) Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/toothless-skull-r...

>We as a species have progressed further than anything else because we do not leave the weak ones behind even when they have no chance. This is what makes us human, not the individualism that modern society promotes.

I don't think OP's point was to leave sick/disabled babies to die, but rather to prevent them from being born. There are some people (ie. anti-abortionists) who think the two are equivalent, but there's also people who think they're not.

I think if we see from the mother's point of view, not the child, then the value of empathy can be more justified.

I have a 6mo who is perfect in every way. If I know he wasn't going to be, or that he was going to be terminally ill, would I opt for him not to be born? No way. Even in that case he would have deserved a chance, which is I.

I'd rather spend the money on healthcare for very sick children with little chance of survival than on the military.

Well we spend over $1.25 trillion on the national security state, but we don't have money for full healthcare coverage in a pandemic.

https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2019/05/making-sense-of-the-1-...

We've spent multiple trillions on this pandemic already (look at the national debt). Much more than on the military which has been declining as share of GDP since WW2.

With what we spent on the War on Terror, every American could have had $15k a year for the last 20 years, yet healthcare is too expensive.

You're off by at least an order of magnitude there. I see estimates from $6 trillion[1] to $8 trillion[2] for the cost of the war on terror. Taking the high estimate and the 2001 population of 285 million (i.e. ignoring population growth since 2001) gives $28k per person, or $1400 per year over 20 years. Accounting for population growth and taking the lower cost estimate decreases the amount further.

[1] https://www.vox.com/22654167/cost-deaths-war-on-terror-afgha...

[2] https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar

That’s off by an order of magnitude - that’s over $100T.

> Much more than on the military which has been declining as share of GDP since WW2.

This was true until we started two different wars following 9/11.

There was a spike but it's been back to declining for a while now. I was talking about the overall trendline.

The trend is pretty consistently between 3-6% since the early 1970s. When you start looking earlier than 1970, it was much higher due to Vietnam and WWII.

Without infinite resources, you have to have some form of rationing. Here is an example of how one socialized medical care system does it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_for_Health_...

Time to ration the military it seems.

i hope you live a life free of events like this. i also hope in the case where you do go through a life-changing traumatic health or financial disaster that people show you more compassion and empathy than you choose to show others when you log into the orange website

for someone who snagged "basedgod" this is extremely, ridiculously not based

This would be a slightly less insane argument (though only slightly) if many states in the US, the state this women lives in for instance, weren’t so puritan about right to abortion. This women had about a week to decide whether to abort—that is clearly not enough.

It's even worse. She would have likely had much less than a week to decide. You don't want to make a major medical decision with getting a second opinion from a doctor who had not been involved up to that point.

She'd have a week to find a new doctor to confirm the diagnosis, and then if confirmed and she instantly decided to abort, schedule an abortion and have it performed--all this during an active pandemic which was slowing medical things down in general.

And let us not forget that the clock does not stop for weekends, so that's two days lost if they can't find an abortion provider that works weekends.

Also, Indiana has an 18 hour waiting period. You must make an in-person visit to the abortion place at least 18 hours before the procedure to receive state mandated information, so that's another day lost (although if they get lucky they might be able to overlap this with a weekend).

This is the worst "well actually" I've ever seen - and the fact it's on this site is unsurprising.

I'm sad to say that it does not surprise me at all. HN with some regularity gets issues of morality horribly wrong, the good news is that at least in this case I can't read the GP.

Terminating a pregnancy that "late" in a pregnancy is difficult in many states, including Indiana.

Which is why health insurance is a terrible systemic decision on which to base your society, and, btw, the early 1900's called. They want their Eugenics advocacy back please. Also, the 2150's called, they have a great deal on designer babies and books on the historical consequences of overreliance on statistical multiplexing as applied to societal safety nets.

Abortion isn't legal in all parts of the world, or even all parts of the USA. Your suggestion would make no sense at all for someone living in Texas, for example. If people are forced to have children they know in advance they can't support, then why shouldn't the government help provide for that child?

trying to quantify the value of a life, much less the life of an unborn infant, because it's "too expensive" reeks

Funny argument from a place where abortion is restricted in many states.

And even if not, you might be in a place or situation where you can't abort, or where you don't know the full truth or you don't know early enough or ...

Many reasons but medical decisions about a living child should not be influenced by whatever reasoning or intention we ascribe to or even know their parents held.

"health insurance shouldn't mean we'll do whatever it takes to keep somebody alive no matter what".

That is a valid thought and a lot of "universal" and "free" healthcare have "costs containment" and even "alternatives" health care (homeopathy) for higher cost diseases[1]

Now the question is when it will come to you or a beloved one will it be ok to me say : "nahh, lets save a lot of money"?

A lot of people think Europe Health system is perfect and universal. It is when you are young. Once you have a hard cancer Rich people take a flight to US.

[1] - https://www.commonwealthfund.org/international-health-policy...

I understand the point you're trying to make. I would like to also point out that non-rich people in the US often just die. It's not like the non-rich US-based get the same care that the rich non-US-based fly here to get.

Username says it all.

This is the cold hard truth, cannot imagine what they've been through as parents but from a purely quantitative perspective this is a totally fair point.

Yeah. I'm disappointed in all the downvotes and flags the parent post got (I briefly managed to resurrect it via a vouch, but it quickly got killed again). It was worded in a terrible, heartless way, but it's not wrong.

The child was doomed from the day they got those test results in. Their doctor was clear with them that the diagnosed condition wasn't something survivable. Why should taxpayers be burdened with medical costs ("millions of dollars", according to OP) in this kind of situation? Why should parents be allowed to cause and prolong the suffering of that poor child, who had to endure so much pain in her short life? I'm sure their intentions were good, but the outcome was so much worse for everyone involved than if they'd terminated the pregnancy. How can we incentivize people to make better decisions in these sorts of situations, when doing the right thing is such a difficult, emotionally-harrowing thing to do?

I think it was your comment that I was replying to but it was deleted before I could post, thankfully I copied it before I posted. Apologies if not.

I think you said we got it wrong, how wrong did we get it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29236092

Maybe the parents would have made a choice you liked if the people of Indiana gave them more than a few days to grieve before taking away the choice to abort.

Oh, I absolutely acknowledge that was a big factor. It's disgusting that the pro-life folks have, yet again, caused suffering through their imposition of their values on others.

I so rarely see pro-death-panel comments, it’s almost refreshing in its disgusting honesty.

It's not disgusting, it's pro-mercy. It'd be a different thing entirely if our medical tech wasn't still barely above primitive efforts like leeches.

E.G. Star Trek level medical tech where there are gene therapies, cybernetic augments, and guided regeneration of body parts? In that world the baby might be viable and could have a life of reasonable quality.

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