> How much should we all pay

That's the important passage.

Many Americans, including those who'd reject Obamacare per se, believe that on a truly righteous planet, we'd all be held accountable for each other's health and wellbeing in some similarly fundamental way.

I think those people are worse than wrong. Not kidding.

They're not nice people. They do not mean well. They're trying to get to Heaven on someone else's dime...

And that's not how it works.

Also, warfare and healthcare are sensibly distinct realms of the human experience, and conflating them as a holistic expression of social engagement is infantile and witless.

Anyone who wants to earn enough money for the very best in health care should be encouraged to do so. They may be comforted.

Furthermore, anyone who wants to go to war in the service of American virtue should be able to do that, too. It will be dangerous.

(PS- I gave more to Fisher House last year than have all the people reading these words in the last ten years.)

(Grrrr.)

"In giving in to those entreaties, however, Congress may leave the Pentagon to send America's forces into battle without adequate body armor or properly armored vehicles and even without sufficient troops to guard ammunition dumps left behind by the defeated enemy - literally as free weapons supermarkets for insurgents. All of this happened in Iraq."

This is basically bullshit. There was money for everything we needed in Iraq, but there is only so much armor you can put on a vehicle before you slow it down so much that it cannot perform, and it turns into a poor sort of bunker, and an easy target for a roadside bomb.
The same is true of body armor. You try carrying 80 pounds of protective gear in 120 degree heat.

Everything in life is a tradeoff, especially the way you use your military resources.

It is impossible to know up front how to allocate your resources precisely in a war. There are just too many variables.

Armchair quarterbacking seems to be very popular with those who have never had any skin in the game.

Isab,

You complain about arm chair quarterbacking in war, but the same applies to medicine.

There are numerous cases where rich people get worse medical treatment. Often the best thing a doctor can do is nothing. But when a patient has vast sums of money and wants to spend it there is usually a doctor who will take their money.

Another example of this is gunshot victims. Poorer areas have more of them. And they also have fewer residents with insurance to pay for care. So free hospitals are often built in these areas and their doctors are highly trained and practiced in this type of injury. When someone with insurance is shot they often go to a 'better' hospital and have worse health outcomes.

In the last year of a person's life they will consume ~25% of their lifetime medical costs.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1464043/

An accountant looks at this and says "If we all just died 1 year earlier we could save all that money." A doctor says "If only I had more money I could buy an extra year of life." I say "Who knows if it is your last year or not, until it is too late."

In engineering, there are "bounding terms" which are useful in the study of any phenomena. Initially, these terms are set to theoretical extremes, such as "zero" and "infinity", and then, as real world factors are acknowledged, the terms are brought closer together.
This practice is largely unknown to the general public, and therefore is not being demanded by a significant fraction of that public of the agencies charged with administering healthcare.

So long as deluded people think that "Healthcare" equals "a long life without suffering", any medical program will be doomed to poor performance at best.
Of course, placing this plan into effect will stop that, but a public determined to engage in fantasies will never tolerate it. As it has, they have not noticed that they are paying for something they will never receive.

Yeah good luck with that. I've had friends with alcoholic diabetic fathers who want to sue hospitals because "they could have done more" so the guy wouldn't die.

Guys who abused alcohol for 20+years, were rage filled monsters, diabetics, and in their late 60s.

Amy feels tickled in a very special place whenever a tweedy academic says the guy on the street is "romantic and silly."

I've never understood why she's so impressed... Academics are typical assholes, and they're assholes on the public budget.

Dolly Parton sure has some big breasts.

^^That's my new go-to alternative comment when I realize what I was originally going to say would cause an argument.

:)

What Price Should We Put On Human Life?

According to other humans, we are priceless. We are the only life that truly matters.

Forget that we have hunted countless species of animals to extinction. Forget that we are destroying the planet and environment. Forget that women used to have few rights. Forget that people of color used to have no rights. Forget that we used to think cigarettes were not unhealthy. On and on....

And yet, we proclaim it's our intelligence that makes us *special*. Priceless even.

Ha! Humans are idiots. How we ever came to believe otherwise is only a testament to our conceded and arrogant nature.

Oops, should have been... "conceited".

Ha! Humans are idiots. How we ever came to believe otherwise is only a testament to our conceded and arrogant nature.
Posted by: Tim at April 12, 2014 3:17 PM

Conceit, arrogance and morality are human generated psychological and religious constructs. They have no relevance, and no meaning in the natural world you seem to revere.

One good asteroid strike will wipe more species out of existence than any 19th century hunter on his best day.

And it will do so without any thought about the planet, the environment or "people of color" who have,historically, just as often been the slavers, as the enslaved.

Isab is quite right. Tim its fine to enjoy, even respect, the life of animals and the natural world.

But before us, nothing in nature would look in awe at the world, gaze at the stars and wonder if it was alone as life in the universe, they have no history but their own lives and nothing about them makes it to the next generation but the genetics when they breed.

A cow, a horse, a lion, can never do more than live, breed, and die slowly and unpleasantly, or quick and painfully by starvation or being devoured alive by some other beast.

Nature is red in tooth and claw, and we are part of that nature, every bit as bloody as the rest, but also capable of so much more than what instinct alone has given limitless other species past and present.

So when you say a rabbit is more valuable than a trophy hunter, I roll my eyes at such idiocy.

"Conceit, arrogance and morality are human generated psychological and religious constructs. They have no relevance, and no meaning in the natural world you seem to revere."

And in this, you never noticed that you agreed with Tim. Practically the definition of irony...

You're (your species) a better competitor than the animals, as demonstrated here.

Doesn't mean you get to discard the laws of nature, prominent among them that of cause and effect.

@radwaste

I am a little puzzled by what subject you think Tim and I are in agreement on. I suspect I am not the only one.

So when you say a rabbit is more valuable than a trophy hunter, I roll my eyes at such idiocy.
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For the record, that's not exactly what I said.

Also, I was speaking tongue-in-cheek. I do that a lot. I find life is unbearable without humor, and I will gladly resort to amusing myself with no shame. :)

Anyway, I hear you. A man is more valuable than a rabbit.

All hail the mighty humans...

At least until an alien life form much more advanced and intelligent arrives to our planet, and starts treating us humans like animals. Heh,

"Ha! Humans are idiots. How we ever came to believe otherwise is only a testament to our conceded (sic) and arrogant nature.
Posted by: Tim at April 12, 2014 3:17 PM

Conceit, arrogance and morality are human generated psychological and religious constructs. They have no relevance, and no meaning in the natural world you seem to revere."

Isab, if you can't see that you buttressed his claim that humans are conceited and arrogant by pointing out that these qualities are anthropocentric, you are simply lost.
And wrong, by the way. It is religious and psychological constructs that the "thumper" beats on to claim "dominion" over the animals as justified by the Bible.

We kill and eat other creatures because we can. That's how the food chain works. It does NOT stop being a jungle just because there are buildings in it - and as the number of wild animals drops, we can and do substitute other people for prey.

> Ha! Humans are idiots. How we ever came
> to believe otherwise....

I'm all for humility, especially to give respect for the natural world's pitiless, insensate cruelty.

But you gotta do it right. You gotta do humility in context, or it doesn't count... And if you screw up, Golda Meir will get all up in your grill. And you'll deserve it.

This is a great pocketknife principle, right here. Been apllying it for over a year now, both on my own heart and in judgment of others... It's never failed.

Meanwhile, every bit of genius you've ever known, including the very best, has been human genius.

There's have been no exceptions.

There's has been. Yes, I said it. Look, I gotta HOA meeting a few minutes, and I was in a rush.

That typo coulda happened to anybuddy.

"That typo coulda happened to anybuddy"
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Lol.

Good posts guys. Thanks for not tearing me a new one. Especially you Rad. I know you are real close to calling me a Bambi lover. ;)

Isab, if you can't see that you buttressed his claim....
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Yep, you totally buttressed my claim. I felt it.

"Isab, if you can't see that you buttressed his claim that humans are conceited and arrogant by pointing out that these qualities are anthropocentric, you are simply lost."

Pointing out that the color green has no meaning outside of human perception of it, does nothing to buttress any claims about the properties of the color green.

You are jumping to conclusions again, as you often do.

Today's word of the day, brought to you by: Vagasil - when dryness lingers, get some cream on those fingers! Vagisiiiil!

>
verb
past tense: buttressed; past participle: buttressed

1. provide (a building or structure) with projecting supports built against its walls.

2. increase the strength of or justification for; reinforce.

I scream, you scream, we all scream for vagina cream, VAGASIL.

So, getting back to the original topic: The problem I have with the exchange is that Reinhardt gave a decent answer to the question of "Can a quantifiable value ever be placed on a human life?". However, that is not the question he was asked. The question he was asked was, and I'm taking the exact words from Gingrey's quoted statement: "[Should] we, as individuals, in America should have the ability to value our own lives, or is this something we should ask the government to do for us?" Reinhardt did not address that question. Perhaps it wasn't fair to ask him to do so, since the question is not one of medical practice but of public policy. Nonetheless, the fact stands that he was asked one question but chose to answer a different one.

Of course, the probable context of the question is the ongoing dicussion concerning the various government interventions in the health care market, and the obvious fear that it is leading to government-enforced health care rationing. I'll have to look into Reinhardt's background on this -- perhaps he has been advocating for government rationing, which would explain why he was asked the question. It looks to me like one of the two parties in this discussion was tap-dancing like heck to distract attention from the elephant in the room, but I'm not sure which one it was.

What is human life worth? Depends on who you are and where you are. A peasant in the Sudan? Two bits. An Arabian Prince? The sum total of every living being under your jurisdiction. A wrongful death in the U.S.? A couple of million if you had a good job. Sorry but all human life is not equal, so trying to value human life as if this were so, is like saying that all paintings have the same value as a Picasso.

This exchange almost makes me miss Patrick.