I just returned from my very lovely vacation, and am catching up on my favorite blogs. And what do I find at Junkfood Science, but a review of Social Value Judgements, a report put out by Great Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence for the purpose of shaping its National Health Service’s policies and budgeting. Sandy Szwarc rightly declares this document dangerous:
The entire world should care about what this disturbing document forewarns. It is the most palpable document in recent history to bring the same bioethical dilemmas, on the moral claim of personhood and quality of life versus the interests of the state, that were raised in the 1920s.
Szwarc ends with a warning that this devaluing of individual personal judgment regarding one’s quality of life is
the inevitable outgrowth of what happens, as history has taught, when health becomes public. When health is a measure of good citizenship. This is the foreseeable results when government foots the bill for healthcare: the state then assumes power to decide what happens to an individual’s body and to determine when a life is of insufficient quality or too costly to society to preserve.
I think that blaming government-run health systems is too limited a view. As we’ve seen in the US with insurance companies, the corporate board can be just as coldly utilitarian as any government bureaucracy, and will just as readily adopt bioethical reasoning in pursuit of limiting expenditures. The real caution is for us all, no matter what system is in place in our particular nations, to value human life so much that we refuse to allow the machinery of governments and corporations to treat any of us as no more than replacable cogs.
