The Terri Schiavo National Health Care Plan

A guest blog from Alan Meisel at Pitt, who has found one, really twisted positive spin on the Congressional effort to keep Terri Schiavo alive:

If states begin to enact statutes that make a written advance directive necessary to forgo artificial nutrition and hydration (or any other form of life support), it could lead to a system of universal health care!

If we have 10-15,000 people in a PVS now (all being kept alive by artificial nutrition and hydration), we will have a lot more if a written advance directive is required. If 1/3 of our nursing home population is now on feeding tubes, we will have a lot more on feed tubes if an written advance difrective is required. The costs will skyrocket. This will put further strain on Medicare and Medicaid -- perhaps to the breaking point. We will then be forced to confront head on whether it makes sense to be expending even huger amounts of resources on medical care than we are now for people who will never benefit from it when we have 40-50 million uninsured, skyrocketing costs for the rest of us, and a seriously medically underserved Medicaid population. This could put so much stress on the system that we will finally get meaningful reform -- a single payer system available to all.

This won't happen soon. But hope springs eternal.