W hen Sarah Palin charged that Obamacare would result in “death panels” she was widely ridiculed. But in the broader sense she was surely right. As government assumes an ever-larger share of health-care funding there will inevitably be issues of health-care rationing especially since the government purse is not unlimited. And with rationing come assessments of the quality of life and decisions about who will live and who will die.
The “quality of life” mentality which does not view life as an infinite good but as a commodity to which a price can be assigned has permeated our societal thinking and perhaps most of all that of doctors. A religious neurologist with whom I maintain an e-mail correspondence recently shared with me a horrifying case involving a neighbor of his — an 80-year-old Auschwitz survivor. She developed a benign brain tumor that soon confined her to a wheelchair and left her speechless.
Her children took her to three of the top neurosurgeons in New York each of whom told them that surgery was impossible at her age. As an afterthought her children decided to show the X-rays to their neighbor my friend. What he saw shocked him. The benign tumor was located very close to the scalp and was easily operable. He confirmed that judgment with a local neurosurgeon.
In the end the woman had surgery at Sloan-Kettering. She was speaking and walking again almost immediately after surgery and released to a rehabilitation clinic within a day of the surgery.
