"Death Panels"

Michael Cannon of the Cato institute writes in the Detroit Free Press and defends Sarah Palin's assertion that a universal health care plan would create death panels.

She is not the only one to believe this. Most universal health care systems like Canada's or Great Britain's use a QALY-like system to determine whether or not someone will receive treatment.

To give an example:

Under QALY, say you are 80 years old and you need a hip replaced. The surgery is slated to cost $30,000 but you are expected to live maybe only another five years (based on government estimates, of course), "experts" would take the number of your life-years remaining and amortize the cost of the surgery over that time. In other words $30,000/5 = $6,000 per year. They may decide the cost is too great for the return of only five more productive years.

However, if you are 55 years old and need a hip replacement, you are likely to have 30 years left to live. So the "expert" again takes $30,000 and divides this time by thirty. This stretches the cost out to $1,000 per year and from a cost/benefit analysis makes sense so the "expert" signs off on the surgery.

QALY stands for Quality-adjusted life year and is more complicated than what I just described. For example, if you are in a wheelchair you likely would get only .5 years adjusted for every year you have left because you are not in "full" health, etc.

The QALY systems basically looks at cost/benefit analysis but it's not for experimental space planes or vortex cannons, we are dealing with living, breathing human beings, not things.

h/t Sister Toldjah