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Comment by karencarits | Hacker News Reader

Not the op but I guess the idea is that questions of life and death should not primarily be economical questions. You are free to disagree, of course, and there is, at some level, economical considerations for all medical treatments. But at least I'm my country is there a sharp divide; an individual should receive the best available treatment without economical considerations. What treatments that are available for various conditions (not individuals!), however, are decided by comparing cost and utility.

There is also an argument that can be made about the meaning of economy is to make lives better, but the opposite is not true

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> Not the op but I guess the idea is that questions of life and death should not primarily be economical questions.

Sure, but as an American life and death is already an economical question *above all else*. The quality of medical care that I receive is already directly linked to how much money is in my bank account and how much my employer is willing to pay for a medical plan.

End of life care in the US is designed with the primary goal of vacuuming every asset out of you and then letting you die once it's gone. It seems unethical to say "sorry, you don't get to opt out of this. Everyone's got to go through the whole process."

That's mostly tangential to my argument though. In many people's lives, there comes a point where you can spend arbitrarily large sums of money to postpone death, but only in a form that I, for myself, don't consider all that valuable: I would be willing to be bedridden, intubated, and barely-conscious as a temporary condition if it meant a full recovery for more life later. But as a holding pattern before death, which is what it usually is, I'd rather not, and I personally would like to spend that money in other ways.

Note that this applies even in cases where all the costs are paid by taxpayers. If the state is making me an offer saying, "we'd like to spend $100,000 to keep you barely-conscious for a few months", that might be more generous in some sense than offing me, but I'd still rather they just give that $100,000 to my kids.

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