A reader writes:
Interesting column from Gene Lyons in today’s newspaper. He says that “To save a lousy $1.4 million (out of a $9 billion budget) Arizona’s Health Care Cost Containment system has decreed an end to organ transplants.” This is for Medicaid patients. He wonders why there is not the outcry from the right similar to the death panel comments.
Very likely nobody outside Arizona has heard about it. Still, is anybody surprised that beancounters are going to decree that the weak need to die and get out of the way? This is how a system ordered toward economic efficiency works. We do not have a system which really takes seriously the idea that the human person matters. We have a system that takes seriously (sometimes) that the human person is a useful source of profit, when he is fit and strong. It maximizes making sure that the fit and strong stay that way (and are therefore useful for as long as possible). When the human person is weak and a) statistically less likely to become lucrative (ie. an unborn baby with an unpromising future or a chronically sick or old person) the system is putting all sorts of pressure on simply returning to paganism and bumping them off. Eventually, when the system conks (as it will surely do) those who are rich and powerful will come to regard more and more of the general population as expendable fodder and, in the end, as slaves. Slavery is the natural condition of man under paganism. The only thing in the history of the world that has ever successfully opposed it is the Christian tradition. Get rid of it and we will return to it just as surely as an unconscious man falls to the ground.