Con

“Futilitarianism, as it is sometimes called, is social Darwinism. It proposes that the old, the dying, those on the margins, and the profoundly disabled must be pushed out of the lifeboat in order to allow others in or, indeed, to keep the boat afloat…

[Daniel] Callahan’s [Director of International Programs at The Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank] embrace of health-care rationing based on futilitarianism is helping drive medical ethics toward extremely dangerous and rocky shores, namely, that individual medical treatment decisions can be based ethically on determinations of ‘social consensus and political will’ rather than on private determinations between patient and physician…

The belief that the health-care system will be destroyed unless we cease spending so much money on dying people is fundamentally misguided…

Even rationing advocates admit that there is little money to be saved by forcing people out of desired end-of-life treatment opportunities…

It may be worthwhile to reduce overutilization of marginally beneficial treatment…but achieving mandatory restrictions by pitting different populations against each other in the political process hardly seems an appropriate way to establish an ethical health-care delivery system.”

1997