September 9, 2009
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Dr. E.J. Emanuel’s The Complete Lives System
Ever wonder what your life is worth? Well, fear no more. Dr. E.J. Emanuel, one of President Obama’s newest medical ethics advisors has already published a paper in Lancet 2009 Jan 31;373(9661):423-31 recommending the use of “the complete lives system.”
Yep, now *you* too can understand how the government plans to quantify your life value, and thus allocate medical resources to you under their brand new health care reform.
Yay! For modern day eugenics!
Principles for allocation of scarce medical interventions. Persad G, Wertheimer A, Emanuel EJ.
Department of Bioethics, The Clinical Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.
Allocation of very scarce medical interventions such as organs and vaccines is a persistent ethical challenge. We evaluate eight simple allocation principles that can be classified into four categories: treating people equally, favouring the worst-off, maximising total benefits, and promoting and rewarding social usefulness. No single principle is sufficient to incorporate all morally relevant considerations and therefore individual principles must be combined into multiprinciple allocation systems. We evaluate three systems: the United Network for Organ Sharing points systems, quality-adjusted life-years, and disability-adjusted life-years. We recommend an alternative system-the complete lives system-which prioritises younger people who have not yet lived a complete life, and also incorporates prognosis, save the most lives, lottery, and instrumental value principle
