The Surprising Upside of Death Panels
The Surpising Upside of Death Panels
or
Why Old People should just Die Already
By Ben Catlin
In the midst of this hopping good time of a raging shouting match / debate I hear all these people getting up in arms about death panels. I just don't get that. It seems like most people don't realize all the great benefits of death panels. So I thought I would briefly run them down here for further discussion.
What is a Death Panel?
This is the first and best part. A death panel is exactly what we want to be since it doesn't actually exist in any form of legislation. But that is exciting, it is like an blank slate of an idea, so we can shape it into whatever we want!
My proposal is as follows. We start by lining up a panel of local people in our area under the age of 35, ones who have the potential to actually contribute to society and aren't almost dead from some stupid disease like swine flu. Preferably the up-and-comer middle management or lower executive types. The ones who are gonna someday run a big company into the ground with their MBAs, but are right now doing just fine giving incomprehensible instructions to underlings.
Then, we have the old people, anyone over say 55 or 60, present powerpoint presentations of their economic value vs age throughout their lives. We have a spending / consumer slide, and a value added to employer slide. Now, we finish with a slide of health care costs over their age, with a running total, and a lifetime total estimate, and then another line on the graph for money spent vs. age on healthcare, with a current total, and a projected total.
Finally, we use a formula to put these things together and determine their death value. If the derivative of this function over time is less than an established value, this old person is not a value to our society and can be euthanized. (Since we know MBA's can't do calculus, we can get a soulless engineer to write a facebook app that can do derivatives for them, we'll even attach it the panels profiles in quiz style - "Death panel member Mrs. Doe took the should Mr. Jones be Euthanized quiz")
Simple over/under. No whining from families, no one is immune, everyone is either dead or not by the rules of the formula.
Surprising, and not so Surprising Benefits
1) No more old people driving slow on the freeway. I know it isn't in my proposed index for death value, but I bet it correlates. Anecdotally I know a guy who said his uncle was almost killed by an old guy driving slow in the left lane cuz he almost hit him while he was doing 80 and texting someone. So this has to be a super-upside for me when I'm checking facebook on my iphone on the way to work.
2) No more people trying to be the leader of the free world who don't know how to use email or a blackberry. The president from here on out should at least have a facebook page. I mean, doesn't everyone who matters have one of those now days...sheesh.
3) Health care costs go down w/o corporation / profit stifling government regulation. We can finally afford for way more white suburban kids to have the gene therapy they need to be the next Micheal Jordan once we aren't paying for old peoples kidney dialysis, heart bypasses, and crazy pills.
4) Tech support calls will do way down since it is mostly old people who don't know how to use computers. This will take away revenue from those Indian companies who do our tech support outsourcing, which will in-turn decrease our trade deficit, strengthen American corporations, and decrease their excess money to make WMD's with. Win-win for us, screw India - it isn't like we wanted to fire those good overpaid *cough* .. I mean well paid highly educated American call-center workers and exploit Indian labor anyway. This will fix things to make them the way they should have been.
5) Since the market for adult diapers will collapse as well as the market for Florida condos all those laid-off workers will start using their credit cards more, which will mean a boost to that segment of the economy. And housing prices will drop, meaning more people can afford to mortgage themselves into Floridian condos. Boom for the economy in the real-estate and credit markets!
In Conclusion...
In conclusion death panels sound awesome. I would be on one, but I don't have an MBA and know how to do calculus so I'm not allowed to make any important financial or moral decisions.
Next time maybe I'll write about how great it would be if they put the government sponsored abortions on these bills so we can extend the authority of the death panel to the unborn. We would have to keep the results and decisions of the pre-born death-panels confidential though since some people don't like this type of deal and might bomb the panel members houses. Nothing like a good old fashion government/bureaucracy power grab in secret. I've missed those since Bush left office.
Too bad those things don't actually appear in any form in any of this proposed plans or legislation. Otherwise we might be able to actually make some progress around here.
Now, all satire aside
In case you are super-dense, this is all supposed to be satire. I don't actually want old people or unborn children to die.
Maybe now we can move on and debate the actually important stuff on this health-care reform. Like, say, how are we going to pay for some of these proposals? Or, what does an electronic medical record actually look like, and how will we standardize the format to make these systems interoperable? Or, how much government is too much? What do we have to do to fix the situation of 46 million people in America don't have health care, and 14000 loose health care every day and 8 million went bankrupt last year due to medical bills?
Originally published at Home of BigCat the Awesome.
or
Why Old People should just Die Already
By Ben Catlin
In the midst of this hopping good time of a raging shouting match / debate I hear all these people getting up in arms about death panels. I just don't get that. It seems like most people don't realize all the great benefits of death panels. So I thought I would briefly run them down here for further discussion.
What is a Death Panel?
This is the first and best part. A death panel is exactly what we want to be since it doesn't actually exist in any form of legislation. But that is exciting, it is like an blank slate of an idea, so we can shape it into whatever we want!
My proposal is as follows. We start by lining up a panel of local people in our area under the age of 35, ones who have the potential to actually contribute to society and aren't almost dead from some stupid disease like swine flu. Preferably the up-and-comer middle management or lower executive types. The ones who are gonna someday run a big company into the ground with their MBAs, but are right now doing just fine giving incomprehensible instructions to underlings.
Then, we have the old people, anyone over say 55 or 60, present powerpoint presentations of their economic value vs age throughout their lives. We have a spending / consumer slide, and a value added to employer slide. Now, we finish with a slide of health care costs over their age, with a running total, and a lifetime total estimate, and then another line on the graph for money spent vs. age on healthcare, with a current total, and a projected total.
Finally, we use a formula to put these things together and determine their death value. If the derivative of this function over time is less than an established value, this old person is not a value to our society and can be euthanized. (Since we know MBA's can't do calculus, we can get a soulless engineer to write a facebook app that can do derivatives for them, we'll even attach it the panels profiles in quiz style - "Death panel member Mrs. Doe took the should Mr. Jones be Euthanized quiz")
Simple over/under. No whining from families, no one is immune, everyone is either dead or not by the rules of the formula.
Surprising, and not so Surprising Benefits
1) No more old people driving slow on the freeway. I know it isn't in my proposed index for death value, but I bet it correlates. Anecdotally I know a guy who said his uncle was almost killed by an old guy driving slow in the left lane cuz he almost hit him while he was doing 80 and texting someone. So this has to be a super-upside for me when I'm checking facebook on my iphone on the way to work.
2) No more people trying to be the leader of the free world who don't know how to use email or a blackberry. The president from here on out should at least have a facebook page. I mean, doesn't everyone who matters have one of those now days...sheesh.
3) Health care costs go down w/o corporation / profit stifling government regulation. We can finally afford for way more white suburban kids to have the gene therapy they need to be the next Micheal Jordan once we aren't paying for old peoples kidney dialysis, heart bypasses, and crazy pills.
4) Tech support calls will do way down since it is mostly old people who don't know how to use computers. This will take away revenue from those Indian companies who do our tech support outsourcing, which will in-turn decrease our trade deficit, strengthen American corporations, and decrease their excess money to make WMD's with. Win-win for us, screw India - it isn't like we wanted to fire those good overpaid *cough* .. I mean well paid highly educated American call-center workers and exploit Indian labor anyway. This will fix things to make them the way they should have been.
5) Since the market for adult diapers will collapse as well as the market for Florida condos all those laid-off workers will start using their credit cards more, which will mean a boost to that segment of the economy. And housing prices will drop, meaning more people can afford to mortgage themselves into Floridian condos. Boom for the economy in the real-estate and credit markets!
In Conclusion...
In conclusion death panels sound awesome. I would be on one, but I don't have an MBA and know how to do calculus so I'm not allowed to make any important financial or moral decisions.
Next time maybe I'll write about how great it would be if they put the government sponsored abortions on these bills so we can extend the authority of the death panel to the unborn. We would have to keep the results and decisions of the pre-born death-panels confidential though since some people don't like this type of deal and might bomb the panel members houses. Nothing like a good old fashion government/bureaucracy power grab in secret. I've missed those since Bush left office.
Too bad those things don't actually appear in any form in any of this proposed plans or legislation. Otherwise we might be able to actually make some progress around here.
Now, all satire aside
In case you are super-dense, this is all supposed to be satire. I don't actually want old people or unborn children to die.
Maybe now we can move on and debate the actually important stuff on this health-care reform. Like, say, how are we going to pay for some of these proposals? Or, what does an electronic medical record actually look like, and how will we standardize the format to make these systems interoperable? Or, how much government is too much? What do we have to do to fix the situation of 46 million people in America don't have health care, and 14000 loose health care every day and 8 million went bankrupt last year due to medical bills?
Originally published at Home of BigCat the Awesome.