the death market
From the Freakonomics blog comes a business case for managed death:
Critics of the measure [a Washington state ballot issue that would allow physician-assisted suicide] point to the story of Barbara Wagner, a cancer patient in neighboring Oregon, whose insurance company denied her request for coverage of potentially life-saving drugs, and instead offered her money for lethal drugs. Oregon is currently the only state where doctor-assisted suicide is legal.
Wagner's health insurance plan is run by the Oregon government, but I can't honestly say this couldn't happen with a private carrier. No matter who's paying the bills, a health care provider must balance treatment of patients with cost management. In Wagner's case, she was battling a return of lung cancer that was likely terminal, and the $4,000-per-month drug her doctor prescribed would not have increased her survival chances to the minimum required by her health plan: 5% after five years.
A 1-in-20 chance of survival is pretty long odds to begin with, and the treatment would cost Oregon taxpayers nearly $50,000 per year. In business, that would be one lousy ROI. If physician-assisted suicide wasn't an option, the insurance may have had no choice but to cover the drugs (or offer pain-management meds, perhaps less costly but still more so than the $50 dose of lethal drugs), so that raises the question of whether "death with dignity" acts really help patients (who, in my view, should not need permission from the state if they wish to take their own lives, or even to recruit someone to help with the task), or merely provides the bean-counters with an effective, albeit morbid, cost-cutting tool.
Critics of the measure [a Washington state ballot issue that would allow physician-assisted suicide] point to the story of Barbara Wagner, a cancer patient in neighboring Oregon, whose insurance company denied her request for coverage of potentially life-saving drugs, and instead offered her money for lethal drugs. Oregon is currently the only state where doctor-assisted suicide is legal.
Wagner's health insurance plan is run by the Oregon government, but I can't honestly say this couldn't happen with a private carrier. No matter who's paying the bills, a health care provider must balance treatment of patients with cost management. In Wagner's case, she was battling a return of lung cancer that was likely terminal, and the $4,000-per-month drug her doctor prescribed would not have increased her survival chances to the minimum required by her health plan: 5% after five years.
A 1-in-20 chance of survival is pretty long odds to begin with, and the treatment would cost Oregon taxpayers nearly $50,000 per year. In business, that would be one lousy ROI. If physician-assisted suicide wasn't an option, the insurance may have had no choice but to cover the drugs (or offer pain-management meds, perhaps less costly but still more so than the $50 dose of lethal drugs), so that raises the question of whether "death with dignity" acts really help patients (who, in my view, should not need permission from the state if they wish to take their own lives, or even to recruit someone to help with the task), or merely provides the bean-counters with an effective, albeit morbid, cost-cutting tool.