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Bill Gates Proposed Death Panels
A death panel is basically a panel of government officials who would decide if a person is worth keeping alive. Variables determining if a sick person should continue receiving health care would likely be the person’s age, how long they will live after a given procedure, and how much a particular procedure will cost the health care system.
Clearly there are an array of moral issues when dealing with these death panels that Gates seems to advocate. Proponents of the idea give an example in which paying $1 million for a medical procedure to extend a persons life a few months should be outweighed by the fact that the same amount of money could hired 30 teachers for a year. Bill gates stated that there was a “lack of willingness” to even remotely consider the question of choosing between “spending a million dollars on that last three months of life for that patient” or laying off ten teachers.
Either way, it is highly unlikely death panels will exist here in the US any time soon, no matter how much money they could save in health care costs.
