Peter Singer speaks for rationing of health care, especially at the end of life, and it has become a quiet cause of many on the Left who support expanded government health care. There has to be control of costs at some point under that system, and the way to do it is to deny care to the terminally ill. Another name for this is euthanasia.
But some right wing libertarians apparently also think there is a case for rationing. This is described by Cato's Will Wilkinson in The Week.
It's an important point he makes, even if he gets it wrong. There already is cessation of care in many, if not most cases of terminally ill patients. Even the Catholic Church does not require care to continue if it is invasive and will cause more suffering than it will alleviate. We all die, after all. If people want to minimize medical care, other than pain relief, as life winds down, that is their business.
The thing is, decisions about cessation of care now are not really made very often by insurance companies, let alone by the government, nor should they be. They are made by the patients themselves, their families and their doctors, all of whom tend to err on the side of life. When they decide to call off further treatments, it is their choice, not some bureaucrat with another agenda.
With the government health care "reforms" under consideration, the decision is bound to be influenced by the government's own need to save money. That is an entirely separate and invidious issue and should not be inserted into the life and death process. In the Netherlands, many old people resist going to the hospital because they know that they might not be cared for in a way that elongates their lives, but shortens it instead.
There is a cold, callous rationality to the likes of Singer and also, apparently, to some variations of libertarianism on this subject.
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