Some American Indian tribes are said to have put very old members of their tribe out in the cold to die when they had reached the point where they could no longer contribute anything productive to the group. The Democrats in the Senate apparently share this approach.
Mike Enzi (R, Wyo) introduced an amendment that would prevent the new “Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation” (it’s part of the Democratic healthcare bill in the Senate – I previously predicted its purpose would be to ration medical care) from putting a value on life-saving treatment by using “quality of life” and “cost-effectiveness” measures “for the denial of Medicare benefits to patients against their wishes.” The democrats rejected the amendment on a party line vote. Thus don’t be surprised when, if this bill passes, old people are denied care solely because they’re old. European countries already do this. In the UK there is an age limit for chronic dialysis. Thus the Democrats are on record as favoring the use of non-medical factors as instruments to deny medically useful treatment.
The AARP supports the kind of healthcare reform now proposed by the Congress. It’s hard to understand whom they represent. It doesn’t seem to be their membership who have a lot to lose if this legislation passes into law.
Make no mistake, rationing of healthcare by fiat and delay is the inevitable consequence of what our legislators (almost all of them Democrats) are now doing. Medical care in the US needs reforming, but “reform” that makes a troubled system worse is not the answer. It’s easy to change something. Make it worse and you’ve changed it.
Bring out your old.
Any excuse to deny, whether by age, weight, alcoholism………how about behaviour that leads to aids??? Hum…….that’s probably ok as being PC.
Funny, how socialism is supposed to be so egalitarian, yet it sets class against class, race against race, and soon, old against young.
I think the ultimate goal is to deny everyone except congress and lobbiests.
I joined AARP just for the insurance as I was denied elsewhere. I’ve dumped them for their stand on our last CA initiative to raise taxes with no accounting for fiscal responsibility. Their magazine is usually pablum. Yeah…….I wonder who they really represent.
Having more information, getting sophisticated technology, and a long etcetera has been replaced by wisdom,and that is part of all our social problems, including the healthcare system, etc:
Our values are not superior than those of our ancestors. We have only substituted their myths and concepts for new ones, we believe to be more “advanced”, but those old myths and symbols are not inferior than our new concepts: The tree of the knowledge, the serpent, the garden of Eden, Adam, Eve, means as much as life, knowledge, temptation, consciousness. The concrete ideas of good and evil in mythology, goes as far as the concepts of good and evil in ethics. The knowledge, on what it has of deep, it never change, but only it surface. Love continues without Venus, and war without Mars, an if the gods not longer intervene in the human life, our understanding of such events remains the same and remains disconcerting.
A long line of complex formulas have replaced the exhuberance of old legends, but without modifying the constant of the human life, thus the science do not capture this in a more intimate way than the poetry or the music.
The modern sufficiency has no limits. We believe to be more illuminated and knowledgable than in past centuries, forgetting that the taughts of Budha placed thousands of beings after the problem of the nothingness, problem that we think to have solved, just because we changed its concepts and have introduced some erudition.
We get lost in terminologies and texts. We remain the same and will be so until the last human existence. Sorry for my aparent pessimism but this is a fact. People like the soft way, we always live in denial and that has not change in the human history and will also never change….
Interesting point Cioran, what do you think Neil?
Actually points…
If he’s saying that human nature doesn’t change, I agree.
“A long line of complex formulas have replaced the exuberance of old legends, but without modifying the constant of the human life, thus the science do not capture this in a more intimate way than the poetry or the music.”
I get much of my exuberance from opera. And some of it is about those old legends. There is so much wonderful symphonic music I love, but I always reach for the opera album.
Science for me was a refuge from the irrational. I see poetry in crystals that reflect their molecular structure.
I also find your post, Cioran, very poetic. I could see the swirling mists of time……….
Caro Operafilly!!
Cara………filly is a girl equine.
It is sad…the masses and those who manipulate them. But then there are the few, like our brilliant host who tries to light the way for those of us, also few, who really want to learn. There will always be the many…….but it is the few who advance human thought.