“A More Perfect Death”?

Mortality has absorbed more of my attention lately…

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Richard Ross (one wonders if this was not some kind of Freudian slip) Douthat makes an ingenious argument against assisted suicide in this NYT op-ed. In place of the usual death-panel argument of the slippery slope, “especially under government-managed health care, to some sort of death-by-bureaucrat,” he offers the idea that “in the profligate, Promethean United States, it probably won’t lead to rationing-by-euthanasia. It’s just as likely to become one more ‘intervention’ that we insist every health insurance plan should cover — on our way, perhaps, to a rendezvous with fiscal suicide.” On the way, he argues that American “instincts run so strongly toward unlimited spending that it’s much easier to imagine the government going bankrupt paying for extreme life-saving procedures than it is to imagine a suddenly cost-conscious bureaucracy pressuring doctors to administer lethal overdoses.” In other words, assisted suicide is the cherry on top of the exploding fiscal cake of nationalized medicine—America the profligate, in death as in life.

Douthat’s argument against assisted suicide sets aside the familiar, ethical objections and ventures into the culturalist realm. As such, it immediately sends my skepticometer readings through the roof. Still, it’s more logically consistent than any death-panel argument I’ve heard so far from opponents of universal healthcare with a public option.