1. GOP/conservatives/insurance industry are virulently opposed to health care reform.

2. said reform opponents have a long track record of fomenting fear, suspicion, etc. among GOP base (christian right) which mobilizes to sway public opinion.

3. this is happening right now with a few well-placed operatives railing against language in the house bill that seeks to standardize and formalize advance health care directive protocols.

4. advance health care directives have been around for nearly 20 years. they offer individuals and opportunity to “own” decisions regarding their care should they somehow be incapacitated.

5. the christian right often equates advance health care directives with euthanasia. period. (even though a directive can very well say “keep me on life support forever.”)

6. to the right-wing-nuts, any language in the bill regarding the directives HAS TO MEAN the government wants to people to commit suicide as part of some larger totalitarian-rule.

7. this is bullshit because the directives do nothing EXCEPT PROTECT INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM and the language in the house bill seeks to expand use of the directives.

8. if anything the language in the bill DIMINISHES GOVERNMENT’S ROLE in end-of-life care … if everyone had a directive, then no one would have to become part of an embarrassing and painful court proceeding … terry schiavo, anyone?

And yes, my mix of things I actually do believe (namely, that Medicare and Social Security do society more harm than good and AARP’s stranglehold on Washington is not in the long-term interests of the majority of people) with over-the-top parody (the answer is to shoot everyone on their 65th birthday) was a dismal failure.

And yes, I was discounting the main source of human life’s value – because ultimately this conversation’s about setting public policy regarding health care, and the main source of a human life’s value can’t, and I believe shouldn’t, be taken into account in considering public policy proposals. Public policy is about serving the needs of the many, and the only way a person positively impacts “the many” – that mass of millions of faceless strangers who will never meet us and never care about us as particular individuals – is as a “working commodity”. So our value as laborers and commodities is our only value relevant to public policy. It’s the only entry in the “benefit” column for analyzing whether or not we’re worth keeping alive.

Yes, the primary source of a human life’s value is the value assigned to that person’s life by their friends and family. Our lives are really worth the sum of how much the people who care about us care. Those who are well-liked and well-loved, their particular lives are worth something to a lot of people, and so their lives have more value than the lives of those who aren’t well-liked or well-loved – but it’s a value that by its nature is wholly subjective, limited in scope to the people who are doing the valuing, and non-transferrable. Important, dreadfully important – after all, it’s what makes our lives matter! But at the same time, meaningless in the greater scheme of things, because it’s based on specific relationships between particular individuals.

Am I making sense? My life’s real value is rooted in how much and whether my friends like me, but that’s private and personal and public policy can’t (how can the relative pros and cons of keeping me alive be evaluated in terms of who’d be sad if I die?) and shouldn’t (There are ~300,000,000 people in America. Being extremely liberal and assuming for the sake of argument there’s 3,000 people who personally know me (that number’s way high) and value my life… what does that matter compared to the other 299,997,000 people in America who don’t know me and to whom I’m 100% interchangeable with every other person they don’t know?). When it comes to making a decision like how to allocate resources, the only way to serve the needs of the many rather than the needs of the few is to evaluate people like worker ants or bees, not humans. Or to bastardize Stalin, when a friend dies it’s a tragedy, when a stranger dies it’s a statistic.

Now, that’s two types of value… neither of which is independent. So what were you talking about?

Frankly, I see no problem with imposing a mandatory retirement age – for retirement into a grave. 65, 70 years – and not an hour longer. Life’s not worth living anyway once you’re arthritic and senile, and a broken down geezer’s no use to anyone else either. We can keep doing what we’re doing now – waste resources on the old. We could leave the old to their own devices, to litter the ground with their disease-spreading carcasses. Or we could dispose of them cleanly, efficiently, and humanely.