Who Will Tell Michael J. Fox He Needs to Die? ObamaCare as celebrity survivor.
  • So what is the driving philosophy underpinning the Obama health care plans for all of us? Let's begin with a few short quotes and one definition that outlines the idea succinctly.
    • • President Obama; "There is a whole bunch of care that's being provided that every study, every bit of evidence that we have indicates may not be making us healthier."

      • Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University: "Life as a whole has no meaning. Life began, as the best available theories tell us, in a chance combination of gasses; it then evolved through random mutation and natural selection. All this just happened; it did not happen to any overall purpose."

      • America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 as introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives (H.R.3200) by Congressmen Dingell, Waxman, Rangel, Stark and others: "The Secretary shall establish within the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality a Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research…with respect to the outcomes, effectiveness, and appropriateness of health care services and procedures."

      • QALY: Quality-Adjusted Life Year. A formula devised by left-wing policy wonks that purports, as David Catron has so ably illuminated on these pages, to measure the worth of your life by assigning a numerical value to each year of your existence. In Catron's words: "A year of perfect health, for example, is given a value of 1.0 while a year of sub-optimum health is rated between 0 and 1. If you are confined to a wheelchair, a year of your life might be valued at half that of your ambulatory neighbor. If you are blind or deaf, you also score low. All that remains is to assign a specific dollar value to the QALY and, voilà, your life has a price tag."
  • So. Who will tell Michael J. Fox he needs to die?

    the philosophy behind ObamaCare, as promoted just a week ago in the New York Times Sunday Magazine by Professor Singer, is the hard cold necessity Obama sees for government to ration health care for people like, well, Michael J. Fox. As Mr. Singer says: "Health care is a scarce resource, and all scarce resources are rationed in one way or another." And quite obviously, with Mike Fox's QALY being what it is (and Singer is a big proponent of using QALY to judge the worth of a life), the time to cut his treatment off was... yesterday. Actually, a lot of yesterdays ago.

    This is what President Obama believes when he says "there's a whole bunch of care" that someone -- this would be the government -- will have to decide not to employ in treating someone like Mike Fox. What about the idea that Michael J. Fox -- not to mention his wife and children, extended family and friends who might actually love the little lug -- think Mike's spirit should count for something here? After all, he did an entire documentary on The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist. In the President's words: "I don't think that we can make judgments based on peoples' spirit. That would be a pretty subjective decision to be making. I think we have to have rules...."

    Right. Rules. Got it. Government rules. Which is another way of saying decisions on Mike Fox's life will, if Obama and company get their way, be resting in the hands of this whiz bang group of policy wonks and bureaucrats