Health bill's 'end of life' clauses are scary

Lane has good insights in Post:

Section 1233, however, addresses compassionate goals in disconcerting proximity to fiscal ones. Supporters protest that they're just trying to facilitate choice -- even if patients opt for expensive life-prolonging care. I think they protest too much: If it's all about obviating suffering, emotional or physical, what's it doing in a measure to "bend the curve" on health-care costs?

Comment on Charles Lane:

His comments are very insightful. Still, you have to go farther. Look at the whole bill.

1. It clearly enmeshes every patient in a government-run system.

That makes the patient an object. Nothing in it will be voluntary, in a real sense. Read Sartre, all the modern thinkers. Subject and object: this makes us into objects of the government, which will the only true subject.

At one point I thought this bill would make us all serfs. (Mark Steyn has good insights here.) But it's worse than that: we just become things, statistics. And, for most of us over 50, bad statistics.

2. It makes every patient not a citizen but an expense. Look at the clauses that would take the money out of your account, or let government troll through your accounts and IRS returns.

This is what makes the end of life clauses so ominous.

And you have to read the whole thing. I don't care what one clause here or there says. The occasional reassuring sentence is negated by clause after clause, and, more important, the whole structure of the thing.

We wrote about it at Herald. Version also at:

http://tinyurl.com/DHhealthedit

Instapundit also links.