Alert!

     There’s been a lot of scare talk about vaccines for various diseases causing autism and other maladies. Most of it strikes me as unsoundly based, more hysterical than reasoned. But now and then there’s a good reason for concern about a vaccine – and it seems one has arisen:

     As the lady in the video says, do your own research. Don’t take anyone’s word for whether this concoction is “safe” -- or “effective” -- or ethical in its origins and developmental methods.

     Take five minutes out of your schedule to view the video above. You’ll thank me.

No Hiding

     When a politician proposes to “give” you something, he’s lying to you. There are no exceptions. Americans once knew that at a visceral level. They understood that the State cannot “give” unless it first takes -- and the taking must exceed the giving for the “transaction” to occur at all.

     But apparently a lot of Americans have never learned about this teensy little fact of life. The evidence is the willingness of a great many to take vipers like Elizabeth Warren as honest and sincere.

     This morning, Silicon Graybeard has a nicely detailed article on Warren’s ridiculous claim that a “Medicare for all” system – socialized medicine without the admission that it’s socialized – will make Americans’ medical care cheaper in aggregate. However, it won’t appeal to the “I was told there would be no math” crowd, as it uses actual numbers. So for the rest, here’s why a claim such as Warren’s cannot possibly ever be true.

---

     Medical care – i.e., the goods and services Americans consume for the maintenance and restoration of their health – is provided by people:

• People make the goods: i.e., the medicines, the devices, and the hospital and clinic buildings.
• People – nurses, doctors, and their various aides and orderlies – provide the services.
• People must be paid for those goods and services.

     Let’s avoid numbers and simply call the current aggregate cost of American medical care – the total we who consume it must pay for it at the retail end -- $X.

     Just now, the transactions involved in making those purchases are dyadic: i.e., they occur between two agents, a provider and a purchaser. Sometimes the purchaser makes use of insurance to afford them, but the actual transaction involves only two actors.

     In a “Medicare for all” system, such transitions become triadic: one or more third parties must be appeased for the transaction to occur. Those third parties are the legions of bureaudrones who would administer the system. They too must be paid. Let’s call the aggregate of their salaries $Y. We’re not paying them at the moment, because they’re not there: Washington hasn’t hired them. There are a few who administer the already existing Medicare system, but their number would surely increase were Medicare expanded to cover all medical products and services. As Medicare currently serves about a fifth of the nation, the population of Medicare administrators would probably increase by about 400%.

     That’s a lot of government salaries and benefits packages. So $Y is likely to be a big number. However, the important thing about it is that it will be a positive number. Therefore, there is simply no getting around the fact:

$X + $Y will be greater than $X.

     So the aggregate cost of medical care under a “Medicare for all” scheme would necessarily be greater than in the current moderately-free market for such things.

     But the advocates of socialized medicine will object: “There are ways to control the costs!” And to the analysis of those ways we shall now turn.

---

     The first notion the socialized-medicine folks will float is the old “waste, fraud, and abuse” gambit. These things, they claim, can be isolated, hunted down, and staked through the heart. Afterward, costs are guaranteed to decrease. (And “we’ll all go to the house of pancakes.”)

     It’s nonsense, of course. It’s a promise politicians always make when they seek to reach into your wallet. The refutation is simple. “Waste, fraud, and abuse” don’t emerge spontaneously out of the primordial ylem. They occur because people commit those acts: producers, consumers, and insurers of medical care. Some percentage of those involved in such transactions will be dishonest, and will endeavor to cheat the system. As the number of persons involved in the system is guaranteed to increase under socialized medicine, the number of dishonest persons would increase as well. (This assumes Washington proves unable to hire from the ranks of the angels, but when has it ever?) Thus “waste, fraud, and abuse” would increase.

     Indeed, the problem might explode. In the current, moderately free system, there are legal consequences should a patient, a provider, or an insurer attempt to cheat and be found out. But were the system to be socialized, a sharply increased fraction of the cheaters would be inside the government, and therefore less accountable to any enforcement agency. Elaborate new systems designed to conceal the cheating from the citizenry would emerge. Supervisors and departmental administrators would be encouraged to look away, perhaps for “a piece of the action.”

     The crusader against “waste, fraud, and abuse” through increased government involvement and control is a con man. “Government,” “honesty,” and “efficiency” have never gone together, and never will.

---

     The second of the socializers’ gambits is price control: under a socialized system, the State would decree that the prices of medical products and services cannot exceed certain maxima. Those maxima would be determined by the administrators of the system, as Congress is too busy with more important matters. (More important than life and death? Why yes: more important than your life or death, anyway.)

     But price controls guarantee that the products and services being price-controlled will become less available. They always have and they always will. So drugs and medical devices of all sorts would rapidly dwindle. The development of new ones would likely halt in place. And of course, those who aspire to become doctors or nurses would view their career prospects in a completely different light: as de facto government employees who lack the right to set the prices for their own services. The balance of incentives and disincentives to enter the medical field would shift toward the negative. We’d have fewer medical practitioners of every sort.

     Maybe medical care would be cheaper...but would you be able to get it when you need it? Ask any Briton or Canadian.

---

     Third and last for this tirade, we have the “tax the rich” nostrum, which is the major arrow in Elizabeth Warren’s quiver. (She does carry a bow and a quiver full of arrows, doesn’t she? I mean, as she’s an Indian, and dislikes guns as well...?) This is a frank admission that costs would increase. It merely seeks to excite the cupidity of the voter by offering to shift his burdens onto other, “rich” shoulders.

     We can leave aside the moral aspects of such a proposition. Either they’re obvious or they aren’t. But the practical aspects are important as well. First, just who are these “rich?” Second, what do you imagine they would do when confronted by the massive tax increases to be laid upon them?

     These are questions Miss Warren refuses to answer, as have all socialists throughout history. “The rich” proves to be an expanding category. It creeps steadily toward you and me as the State discovers that it “needs more money.” As for the behavioral changes “the rich” would adopt in the face of sharply increased taxation, discussing those is anathema to anyone on the Left. Leftists hate to ponder incentive effects and their operation in a dynamic system. They prefer a static picture of the world, in which “the rich” simply have to hold still and take whatever reaming they’ve “got coming.”

     If you’re thinking about emigration restrictions and anti-capital-flight legislation, you’re not alone.

---

     So Elizabeth Warren’s “Medicare for all” claims differ not at all from any other proposition about socializing medicine (or anything else). Either the costs Americans would bear would increase, or the availability of medical care would sink toward the levels that are currently costing lives and lifespans in every nation that’s adopted such a scheme. And you don’t need numbers to demonstrate it.

     Ultimately, the laws of economics will prevail over all political attempts to repeal or modify them. Whenever Smith wants something that he must purchase from Jones, the laws of supply and demand, in particular, will dictate the course of events. The costs – in money, time, pain and suffering, quality of products and services, and quality of life – cannot be lowered by waving a government wand. There’s no hiding them...nor is it possible to hide from them.

Death Cult News

     Dear Holy Father Pope Francis: Inasmuch as you’ve been, ah, rewriting quite a lot of Christian doctrine, I must ask: Is “Thou shalt not kill” still in effect? You know, still binding? Or have you decreed a bunch of exceptions? Because we’re getting some “pushback” on it:

     Canada’s Supreme Court took democracy out of the death equation by conjuring a “right” to be made dead under very broad circumstances.

     Now, pressure is starting to force religiously-affiliated medical institutions and doctors to kill.

     After a Catholic hospital refused to euthanize a patient, who apparently received inadequate pain relief in the process of transfer, calls are being made to force Catholic and other faith institutions to commit what the Church considers a cardinal sin.

     Canada’s National Post reports on the keystone case:

     Ian Shearer had had enough of the pain and wanted a quick, peaceful end, his life marred by multiple afflictions.

     But the Vancouver man’s family says his last day alive became an excruciating ordeal after the Catholic-run hospital caring for him rebuffed his request for a doctor-assisted death, forcing him to transfer to another hospital.

     The combination of the cross-town trip and inadequate pain control left Shearer, 84, in agony through most of his final hours, says daughter Jan Lackie....

     Shearer’s experience at St. Paul’s Hospital highlights one of the thorniest issues concerning assisted death: the decision of most faith-based — but taxpayer-funded — health-care facilities to play no part in a practice made legal by the Supreme Court of Canada and federal legislation.

     [Emphasis added by FWP.]

     When the State pays the fiddler, the State calls the tune. That’s been established as “case law,” both in Canada and in the U.S., in a variety of settings. And so, in Canada’s “single payer” medical-care environment, the Canadian federal government can, if it so chooses, impose a legal requirement that Catholic hospitals kill its patients on request.

     The next question should be “On whose request?” What about patients who are, temporarily or otherwise, non compos mentis? And what about the “quality of life” opinions of governmental medical-care rationing commissions? To this point no one has addressed it openly, but you may be sure that the death cultists have been mulling it over.

     The Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch are surely bright and alert enough to see where this is headed. Why, a few of you are even Canadians, so I shan’t insult your intelligence by pressing it further. But American readers still uncertain about their choices in the upcoming election have some extra thinking to do.

     Just now, the Democrats in Congress are agitating for the transformation of the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” a rolling disaster designed to be politically unworkable and financially unaffordable from the very first, into a Canadian-style single-payer system. Some of the advocates for such a system have even called for Medicare and Medicaid to be “integrated” into it, creating a single, no-escape system in which all life-or-death decisions would come under the purview of the federal government. And Hillary Rodham “I didn’t send or receive classified material on my gee-whiz / look-Ma homebrewed email server and anyway what difference at this point does it make?” Clinton is in favor of exactly that, as she established in 1993.

     Still think installing Donald Trump in the Oval Office is “too big a risk?” Think it over. Your life could depend on the answer. As for His Holiness’s opinion, I’ll let you know when he replies.

Just A Bag Of Recyclable Parts

     That’s you, Gentle Reader. At least, it could be, if you got a few bad breaks.

     The drive for the legalization of “euthanasia” – etymologically, “good death” – was never an isolated controversy. It was a starting point. Indeed, it could be nothing else.

     When I wrote this piece, I hoped that my readers – never numerous but unusually thoughtful and vociferous – would grasp the point and argue more passionately about it than my capacities allow. Maybe some did. But if so, it doesn’t seem to have done much good.

     You see, “euthanasia” as its proponents described it was supposed to be something which the victim had consciously, affirmatively chosen as the best of the alternatives for relieving his suffering. In other words, it was his idea. But the “medical community,” especially in Europe, saw possibilities the rest of us did not. We old fuddy-duddy moralists simply couldn’t conceive of an argument for killing innocent, defenseless people for “the common good.”

     It seems “doctors” in Belgium and Holland are on the leading edge of developments once again.

     No pull quote this time. Read the article. Read the two articles it links. Then sit back and ponder for a moment the incentives created by the increasing demand for transplant organs. And be aware as you ponder that despite all efforts to ban the practice, people are successfully bidding for and paying for preferential access to those organs.

---

     Back in the Sixties, science fiction writer Larry Niven included in his developing “Known Space” canon a story titled “The Jigsaw Man.” If memory serves, Harlan Ellison included it in his Dangerous Visions anthology. The plot driver was a society in which transplantation technology had coupled with an increasing fear of death to yield a legal code in which execution was the penalty for virtually every kind of offense. The protagonist anticipated being executed for a traffic violation – in an operating theater, of course, so his organs could be harvested for others’ use.

     There have been persistent rumors that the Communist Chinese have been performing executions in this manner. Well, if so, they’re not alone, as the article cited above should make clear. Except, of course, that the “patients” being “euthanized” by those “compassionate” Low Countries “doctors” haven’t necessarily consented to the procedure. Some of them are intellectually handicapped. Others are mentally ill. And a few just might have been “sacrificed” to the “greater good” – and a cash payment – with the connivance of their next of kin.

     This is what happens once a human life is no longer considered a sacred gift from God. It’s what happens when we grant attention to moral idiots that claim that “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” It’s what happens when self-styled “medical ethicists” such as Daniel Callahan and Zoe Fritz proclaim that physicians should treat some of their patients to death instead of life in the name of the “greater good.”

     The commoditization of life cannot be halted by any but the most stringent means: relentless and rigorous prosecution of these followers of Jack Kevorkian for first-degree murder. And even with that, some will still escape, for a huge part of what was once called Christendom has embraced the fantasy of fleshly life and health unending.

     Where there’s a demand, a supply will inevitably emerge.

---

     I can’t go on about this much longer. It horrifies me too deeply. What makes it worse than the “mere facts” is that so many people are willing to entertain the idea that a human body is merely one more commodity – that “doctors” should be granted the power to kill if they deem it “in the patient’s best interests.” The easy segue to “in society’s best interests” is overlooked.

     The civilized world abolished slavery on the grounds that a human life is not a commodity – that it’s the inalienable right of its possessor to continue to live it unmolested, as long as he does so without violating the equal rights of others. The reduction of that right to a commodity puts human lives on the same plane as all other tradable goods – i.e., deemed morally exchangeable for other considerations. Add that most terrible of all insubstantial arbiters, “society,” to the mix, and Niven’s “Jigsaw Man” pops over the horizon and approaches at express-train speed.

     Think about that as you contemplate giving someone else – spouse, child, or anyone else – a power-of-attorney that could some day determine whether you’re to live or die. Ponder whether that “loved one” might, at some cash-strapped future time, see you as just a bag of recyclable, highly marketable parts.

     And pray.

Demographics And The Medicalization Of Human Existence: An Addendum

     For those who don’t read comments sections, the indispensable Pascal Fervor has kindly dug up the Web Archive Service’s copies of the articles linked in the piece below:

• The Convergence Is Complete: The execution by torture of Terri Schiavo;
• The Ultimate Destination Of The “Compassionate State:” the government-decreed starvation of Leslie Burke;
• A Little Death: Amy Richards's murder of two of her three unborn triplets;
• A Reason They Do Not Wish To Tell: Concerning “embryonic stem cell research;”
• Have A Dollop Of Horror: Concerning “assisted suicide;”
• Just Another Manic Monday: Concerning the “Groningen Protocol.”

     Thank you very much, Pas.

Demographics And The Medicalization Of Human Existence – The Consequences

     Upon reading this brief piece by Wesley J. Smith, I was cast backward in time, to an essay I wrote in 2007. It appears below. Before proceeding to it, please read Smith’s article and ask yourself about the proliferation of “assisted suicide” laws here in the United States: specifically, which demographic’s political pressure and influence called them into being, and which demographic, at any particular time, is most likely to “benefit” from them.

     (The links won't work because they all point to Eternity Road, which no longer exists. Sorry about that.)

---

     Quite a percentage of the most upsetting stories of the past few years have had a medical character. The execution by torture of Terri Schiavo, the government-decreed starvation of Leslie Burke,and Amy Richards's murder of two of her three unborn triplets come to mind at once. The medical sector of society seems to have infiltrated parts of our media, and our consciousness, we once reserved for serial killers and horror writers.

     We needn't stop there, of course. Just murmur "embryonic stem cell research" to yourself in a dimly lit room, and watch the shadows surge menacingly around you. Or perhaps "assisted suicide," the "choice" whose proponents become more militant with each passing year. If you haven't yet crept quivering under your desk, consider the "Groningen Protocol," which multitudes of European and American physicians have enthusiastically endorsed. It would seem that the most venerated of the "helping professions" has grown bored with helping people to live, and has taken on a sideline of a quite different sort.

     Why are physicians helping to stoke the engines of death, and why are we allowing them to do so?

     If you haven't asked yourself that question yet, check your pulse: you may have died and not noticed. Of course, in that case the subject would seem a deal less relevant, but your Curmudgeon will proceed nevertheless.

***

     Immediately after World War II, the massed armies of the combatants pretty much dropped their guns where they stood and flocked home to procreate. In the United States, the population surge this produced is well known as the Baby Boom, and its individual members as Boomers. Though the phrase is American, the other nations that were heavily involved in the war all experienced similar demographic spikes, as fighting men all over the world remembered that there was an activity they greatly preferred to taking orders and dodging bullets.

     For at least forty years, the worldwide Baby Boom has been the demographic fact of greatest significance to the nations it affected. It's pulled politics, economics, technology and culture into its wake; the desires of so great and concentrated a mass could hardly do otherwise. But its influence on the attitudes and practices of the medical field, and the interplay of medical with political trends, have been less well analyzed than they deserve.

     The influence of the vast Baby Boom market on the commercial sector has been plain to see. Whatever Boomers wanted, or were imagined to want, industry strained to produce. By and large, that hasn't been a bad thing. But today, with the Boomer cohort trudging toward late middle age and peering forward at seniority, what Boomers want is quite different from what we wanted twenty years ago.

     Basically, we want to be young again. Functionally young, not calendrically. We want to look young, feel young, enjoy the pleasures and opportunities of youth, and -- here's the kicker -- evade the burdens and responsibilities of age. Of course, many an oldster before the Boom has wished for his youth back, for the above reasons and others. But never before in recorded history has a demographic cohort this large wished for that benison this ardently, and been as pandered to as ours is being.

     When we were young, we were treated like royalty. We were catered to as children, given few or no responsibilities and whatever pleasures or diversions we wished. We were made into the center of the universe as teenagers and young adults, told that our half-assed opinions mattered despite our callowness and ignorance, and flattered by legions of politicians and media barons. As we moved into middle age, we were handed the reins of government and industry without a fight, and largely without having to prove our mettle. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be a Boomer was very heaven.

     It was a natural consequence of the postwar years. The wars had reaped tens of millions of lives; disease had ravaged tens of millions more. Our parents, weary with conflict and destruction, looked to us to improve on their record...in a sense, to save the world not only for them but from them. Wishful thinking? Yes, of course...yet on what grounds could a youngster of our day assert that he'd have been immune to the temptation? Since the Industrial Revolution, no generation had been tested as severely as the parents of the Baby Boom. It might be dozens of centuries before men face such trials again.

     But understanding it is insufficient to avert its consequences. Boomers are a youth-fixated people. As we move ever deeper into the latter halves of our lives, our desire to avert the consequences of that transition becomes ever more powerful. We devote increasing amounts of time, money, and effort to preserving the things of youth. We'll even take the form if we can't have the content; witness the explosive growth of the cosmetic surgery industry.

     The implications for the medical field, including the critical field of medical research, would seem to be clear. Some of them, at least:

• We want to look and feel young.
• We want to be treated the way we were when we were calendrically young.
• We don't want to become infirm.
• We certainly don't want to die.

     Science fiction author Larry Niven, in a series of stories in his "Known Space" canon, narrated some of the more horrifying sociopolitical consequences of a youth-fixated / death-averse world. If the vote could be used to stay young and hale, he reasoned, it would be. Therefore, given the chance, citizens would vote for the death penalty for every imaginable offense, and mandate that the sentence be carried out in an operating room. The condemned would be transformed into transplant resources, to help keep the law-abiding folks alive and well.

     We're not at that point yet, but we're getting closer. Embryonic stem-cell research is not morally distant from Niven's premise. A few nations have considered passing mandatory organ donation laws. A few folks have even suggested that executing a condemned man and throwing away his body is simply wrong, when his organs could help to compensate for the harm he'd done in life.

     If such nightmares poke their snouts into the light of day, it will be because Boomers have demanded them.

     But Niven's speculation is far from the end of the subject. Young persons, healthy and vigorous, seldom need health care, and therefore seldom need to pay for it. The older they get, the larger this burden becomes financially. Medicare and Medicaid, along with the pervasive practice of paying for any and every kind of medical service through insurance, have greatly accelerated those costs, per office visit, per lab test, per treatment, and per capita.

     A Boomer today not only faces medical bills far greater than his parents did at his age, but the treatments and services he buys are much more desirable to him: less painful, more likely to work without undesirable side effects, and more oriented toward maintaining him in a condition of fitness and vigor. To his parents, medicine and its practitioners were a recourse in times of great need, invoked only to cope with serious conditions and life-threatening injuries. To him, "health care" is the Fountain of Youth.

     If you've never understood how a nation with so many horrifying examples of the failures of socialized medicine before its eyes could nevertheless flirt with allowing Washington to nationalize the health care industry, perhaps you understand it now.

***

     The above certainly has explanatory power for much of the medicalization of human existence. But there's another, darker facet to Boomer culture that remains to be critically examined: how Boomers' desire to remain young and hale feeds the engines of death.

     We needn't linger over embryonic stem-cell research. That's really part of the "positive" side of the equation: the part that hopes that by sacrificing the most defenseless proto-humans of all, we might contrive to extend our own health and vitality. To grasp the negative side of things, we must study financial factors more deeply.

     A dollar spent on X is unavailable to be spent on Y; this is the monetary corollary to the Principle of Scarcity on which all of economics is based. He who projects that his own bills will be rising sharply, for whatever reason, will certainly feel a desire to minimize the expenditures others "force" upon him. If he foresees great increases in those involuntary expenditures upon others, that would force him to reduce his expenditures upon his personal needs and desires, he will be greatly distressed. He might toy with "doing something about it."

     Thus, we enter the realm of euthanasia.

     A mere three generations ago, the suggestion that Gramps be "put to sleep" for any reason, much less to free his kids of the bills for his maintenance, would have been greeted with an outrage that transcended horror. Today it's an active topic of discussion. Several states have submitted to the demands of such groups as the Hemlock Society by enacting "assisted suicide" laws. From time to time, public figures have made comments about the "duty" of the old to "get out of the way" of the young. "Ethicist" Peter Singer, a hero to many for his arguments in favor of retroactive abortion, argues that below a certain "quality of life," a creature no longer possesses a right to life, and can be put involuntarily to death for utilitarian reasons -- an assertion that reaches every point on the spectrum of age. The doctors who authored the Groningen Protocol have employed this argument, too.

     Boomers grant the discussibility of euthanasia for the lowest of all reasons: it would save us money. We'd no longer have to worry about how to foot the bills for Gramps, or for the spouse with terminal multiple sclerosis, or for the child with severe cerebral palsy or Down's Syndrome. Beyond the money, it would save us having to labor over those wretches, or endure their complaints and their lack of gratitude. Away with them! If the State won't take them off our hands, maybe God will! More time and money for us, that's the ticket!

     Of course, we hedge our selfishness and cowardice with the nicest of stringencies. There must be consultations and deliberations. Family, physicians, psychiatrists, bureaucrats -- everyone must have a say. There must be nothing that could possibly be done for the sufferer to elevate his "quality of life" near to that of an actual person. And of course, when we inevitably decide upon the inevitable Quietus, it must be painless -- not for the sake of the guest of honor, but as a balm for our own consciences.

     And the "medical community," power and wealth in prospect, rushes to comply. Hippocratic Oath be damned; that might have been good enough for the pagan Greeks, but we're beyond all that now. We're civilized.

     Are we?

***

     A final twist of the stiletto remains: the inevitability of our own ends.

     As a rule Boomers are not good about bearing pain or helplessness. Of course, that's one of the drivers of the New Medicine; never before have there been so many different analgesics and therapies for pain, and so many artifices to help a disabled person cope with the challenges of life. But ultimately, all these things must fail; no one's body can be kept sound forever. He who is unlucky enough to outlive his health and strength must either accept increasing discomfort and the loss of his abilities, or die.

     Because we've known so little pain and disability, a good many of us want to make certain that we'll have "assistance" toward the Final Exit when the time comes. It's a form of cowardice that earlier generations resisted far better than we...but then, a member of the pre-Boomer generations bore more pain in his first ten years of life than a typical Boomer will know lifelong.

     Few Boomers who call vociferously for "assisted suicide" laws pause to think about the pressures our progeny might put upon us to "use" those laws...possibly well before the thought ever enters our heads.

***

     The medicalization of our existence is being driven by our existence itself: our privileged position in space, time, and circumstance as the least burdened, most pampered people ever to slide behind the wheel of a Lexus. Life is good; we want to keep it that way, especially those of us from the have-it-all Boomer generation who've hardly known privation or suffering. If the promises become lurid enough, we might well succumb to the lure of bureacratized doctors as unreviewable arbiters of life and death -- and don't kid yourself; socialized medicine, for which "universal health care" is a mere circumlocution, means exactly that.

     Think, and pray.

Frontiers In Medicine

     Perhaps that should be non-medicine:

     Now, a medical journal is upping the stakes by calling such interventions [i.e., care provided to prolong a patient’s life] “non-beneficial treatment (NBT):” From the International Journal for Quality in Healthcare article (my emphasis):

     The term NBT therefore reflects an objective inverse correlation between intensity of treatment and the expected degree of improvement in a patient’s health status, ability for survival to hospital discharge or improvement in quality of life.

     Note that keeping the patient alive because the patient wants to stay alive isn’t mentioned. In other words, the medical technocrats and bioethicists are redefining the core purpose of medicine — maintaining life when that is wanted — and claiming that keeping a patient alive can be non-beneficial.

     This is what we of a classical bent like to call a straw in the wind. The event itself may be of minor significance, but the direction in which it points is critical.

     “Bioethicists” have made similar statements several times. The odious Daniel Callahan is notorious for them. His most notable disclosures of opinion concern weighing advances in medicine against “other social goods” and the immorality of consuming medical resources to prolong the lives of the elderly when those resources could be used elsewhere. If opinions such as his are gaining a foothold in the thinking of medical care providers, we elderly Baby Boomers are in for a rough (but short) ride.

     And you thought ObamaCare was about access to health care for everybody, eh?