Bill Gates Supports Death Panels, Rationing Medical Advances

It is funny–in both the ha-ha and ironical senses–that those who often scream most loudly against the “death panel” meme often follow, sotto voce, ”But we need death panels.” The fact is that most of those in the technocratic classes want to medically discriminate against those who are seen as health care “takers” or perceived to have a lower quality of life.

They’re just not sure how to get from “here” to “there,” and retain popular support. (Hint: They can’t.)

billgatesNow in a Rolling Stone interview, Bill Gates joins the chorus. He says–like bioethicist Daniel Callahan–that we have to be careful about making technological improvements in medicine because we won’t want to make them available to all. From the interview:

    G:…If you accelerate certain things but aren’t careful about whether you want to make those innovations available to everyone, then you’re intensifying the cost in such a way that you’ll overwhelm all the resources.

    RS: Like million-dollar chemotherapy treatments.

    G: Yeah, or organ transplants for people in their seventies from new artificial organs being grown. There is a lot of medical technology for which, unless you can make judgments about who should buy it, you will have to invade other government functions to find the money. Joint replacement is another example. There are four or five of these innovations down the pipe that are huge, huge things.

    RS: Yeah, but when people start talking about these issues, we start hearing loaded phrases like “death panels” and suggestions that government bureaucrats are going to decide when it’s time to pull the plug on Grandma.

    G: The idea that there aren’t trade-offs is an outrageous thing. Most countries know that there are trade-offs, but here, we manage to have the notion that there aren’t any. So that’s unfortunate, to not have people think, “Hey, there are finite resources here.”

But they do want to have the government (or bioethics committees delegated the task by government) decide “when to pull the plug on grandma.” Moreover, ”trade offs” is a code term in this context for death panels.


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