Kitzhaber is cool

So lets start by a quote from him...

"Everybody dies...You can't keep people alive forever, but what you can do is save as many as you can. It's not a lack of compassion, but sooner or later we have to come to grips with an era of limits."

I cannot express how much my views on life are represented in this quote. Not necessarily about health care, but about the way things are treated in life in general. This is not a perfect world, there are still limited resources (yeah that surprised me too, I mean, after all I thought after using more and more resources, there would be more out there), and there will be a point when these resources run out. The best thing to do is to ensure the longevity of such a system, and to ensure it effects the most people. I think that the Oregon Health care Plan was great minus the last revision due to the recommendations of the DHHS.

Obviously the first of these plans was a failure. It was a pure cost-benefit analysis with no input on what society wanted. However, taking into consideration what society wanted, a new plan was formed and hand examined. I think the problem was that society was not ready to come to terms with the fact that they believed certain lives based on quality of life were more valuable than others. Personally when I think of this situation, the situation in which the ADA had basically prevented the accepting of this plan, I think of people in vegetative states and similar cases. I don't think it is fair that just because society has an attachment(and a very negative one at that) to life that we should use resources to save those not beneficial to society. Yes, there are people who have no benefit whatsoever to society, and yet resources are still devoted to them. How does that better society in any way, other than to put up the facade that we actually cherish the human life? This sort of situation might even be attributed to non-curable diseases, but at least in that case, we can milk them for all that they are worth up until the point where they are no longer useful. The thing is, no one is willing to see this, or at least admit it, and that was the flaw in the 2nd implementation of the plan: the citizens' views were of the kind that some lives are more valuable than others.

I think the most important benefit in this case is the enhancement of quality of life and the range of people for which it applies: everyone. This system clearly helps the greatest number of people, and because it is dependant on a quality of life standard, it is for the greatest amount of good. This all assumes that 'good' means having a life free of obstacles. (Then again, funding for the disabled might be considered living a life free of obstacles...) It just seems hard to argue against a system which includes everyone, and still ends up in the black. Some of the concerns presented by DHHS just seemed outrageous. Take the infertility example given: infertility is listed as a disability in the ADA. Because of this, they criticized the plan because medical operations which involve infertility fell in the 15th category out of 17. This is because they did not treat the maximum amount of people for what they were worth. Another criticism given was that the quality of health care in the plan was not the same as with private health care. Well, that's because private health care is paid for by the people, and not handed out. These are gifts from the government, you cannot expect them to be in the form of gold watches, free corvettes, and luxury cruises. That is the reality of government programs, and as harsh as it seems, somebody has to get the shaft in a society that values free market economics that makes room for gifts and inheritances.

How about taking a step back to Rawls for a moment and applying the veil of ignorance. If we were to apply it here, would this situation be just? I guess we'd have to use an altered form of the veil, assuming you only could be left in a situation under the poverty level. Would you rather take the risk of falling well below that level in order to achieve proper health care for many conditions? I think that this situation points how just how bad of a situation you have to be in in order to hold adequate health care, and in my opinion, I'd much rather have a system where if I'm going to be poor, I'd appreciate some help in the form of health care.

In the end we are left with the question again of what the role of a health care plan is supposed to be, given limited resources: To please as many as possible by giving 100% of the people who fall below the poverty line a form of health care; or to limit the plan itself to those who are really really poor, excluding the 'richer' poor from the sort of care they need?