That’s the question Neil Gaiman answers in his poem “Instructions,” which I love; since I found out today that YouTube has a video of him reading it, I had to post it.
Interestingly, the artist Charles Vess is working to turn it into a picture book. Follow the link for a sample illustration, and links to more. That ought to be wonderful.
As the ABC News website tells the story (HT: C4P commenter William Collins),
The news from Barbara Wagner’s doctor was bad, but the rejection letter from her insurance company was crushing.
The 64-year-old Oregon woman, whose lung cancer had been in remission, learned the disease had returned and would likely kill her. Her last hope was a $4,000-a-month drug that her doctor prescribed for her, but the insurance company refused to pay.
What the Oregon Health Plan did agree to cover, however, were drugs for a physician-assisted death. Those drugs would cost about $50.
“It was horrible,” Wagner told ABCNews.com. “I got a letter in the mail that basically said if you want to take the pills, we will help you get that from the doctor and we will stand there and watch you die. But we won’t give you the medication to live.”
Barbara Wagner is not alone in this experience.
“It’s been tough,” said her daughter, Susie May, who burst into tears while talking to ABCNews.com. “I was the first person my mom called when she got the letter,” said May, 42. “While I was telling her, ‘Mom, it will be ok,’ I was crying, but trying to stay brave for her.”
“I’ve talked to so many people who have gone through the same problems with the Oregon Health Plan,” she said.
Indeed, Randy Stroup, a 53-year-old Dexter resident with terminal prostate cancer, learned recently that his doctor’s request for the drug mitoxantrone had been rejected. The treatment, while not a cure, could ease Stroup’s pain and extend his life by six months.
“What is six months of life worth?” he asked in a report in the Eugene Register-Guard. “To me it’s worth a lot. This is my life they’re playing with.”
The thing is, though, to the state of Oregon, six months of these people’s lives isn’t worth much of anything—and it’s the state of Oregon that’s paying the bills. The inevitable result of this, asSarah Palin has been pointing out, is that a dollar value is placed on human life; if the cost of keeping someone alive is higher than that dollar value, then their life is judged “not worth living.” The logical thing to do in that case is to maximize savings and simplify the situation by encouraging the patient to accept euthanasia. This time, euthanasia advocates apologized for this in the case of Barbara Wagner—not because they believed they were wrong, but because the encouragement was offered with “insensitivity,” without “the human touch.” Next time? Who knows?
There’s a reason that in her first Facebook note on this subject, Gov. Palin’s thoughts went immediately to her son Trig: this sort of attitude is already dominant in the medical response to Down Syndrome babies. There’s a reason why over 90% of such babies are aborted, and it isn’t all about what the parents think or want, let me tell you. Or, better, let Gretchen tell you, from her post “Remembering” on the group blog Beautiful Work (HT: Jared Wilson):
It was 2 years ago this month that I was sitting in a chair looking at my unborn baby in 4D. She was precious! We had previously found out that our baby had several “markers” for down syndrome and had enlarged kidneys which may have required surgery upon birth. Thus we were monitored more carefully and had a ton more ultrasound shots at a hospital. This was the first level 3 ultrasound with this pregnancy (I had had one with my 3rd with no problems). I got to gaze upon my baby for almost a full hour—it was wonderful! I was there alone as my husband was out of town. The specialist doctor called me in after the ultrasound to go over the findings. The first words out of his mouth to me were “Well you will have to come in tomorrow for your abortion because of how far along you are.” I was utterly shocked and devastated. All I could do was mutter “What??????” He then proceeded to tell me that my baby had more “markers” for down syndrome and it didn’t look good. I was more shocked that his automatic assumption was that I would abort my baby. I almost couldn’t comprehend what he was telling me in that office. All I wanted to do was run as far away from that man as possible.
Read the whole post—it’s well worth it. Like the Palins, Gretchen and her husband opted to have the baby. The irony of their story is that their baby was born two years ago . . . without Down Syndrome, and in fact with no medical issues whatsoever. The automatic reflex of the medical system would have aborted a perfectly healthy little girl.
In all this, I think the reactions of Wagner’s ex-husband Dennis, on the one hand, and euthanasia advocate Derek Humphry, on the other (both quoted in the ABC News article), are telling. Here’s Humphry:
People cling to life and look for every sort of crazy cure to keep alive and usually they are better off not to have done it.
In other words, Humphry believes, people are better off dying than fighting to live. By contrast, here’s Dennis Wagner:
My reaction is pretty typical. I am sick and tired of the dollar being the bottom line of everything. We need to put human life above the dollar.
As it happens, I do believe his reaction is pretty typical among most folks; and in my experience, Humphry’s attitude is usually lurking in there among advocates of euthanasia, even if most of them can’t afford to be as blunt about it as the founder of the Hemlock Society, a man who has already “assisted” one wife into the grave. This really is the line between the sides here.
Now, at this point, you might be thinking that this doesn’t affect you all that much, because the concept of euthanasia doesn’t really bother you that much. What you need to understand, though, is that assigning dollar values to human lives corrupts the whole system—the extent to which that already happens with our private insurance bureaucracy is part of the problem with our health care system—and that when it’s the government doing the assigning, there’s no way to counterbalance that corruption, so it spreads unchecked. As is always the way with consequences propagating through a complex system, that produces changes beyond those which we have already thought to expect.
For instance, in that same first Facebook note, Gov. Palin pointed out a very important point made by Thomas Sowell: “Government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost.” She went on from there, as most critics have, to point out that this will inevitably result in the rationing of health care—and so it will, as it always does. But that will not be the only effect of this new reality if Obamacare goes into effect. C4P‘s Doug Brady has also pointed out that the US health care system drives most of the world’s medical innovation, including the creation of new drugs, and that government price controls will bring an end to most of that innovation. This too is true, and important; but it too is only part of the cost of price controls. It’s not merely that price controls will limit who receives medical care, or that they will depress the future potential of that care; they will also, over time, reduce the present value of that care.
To illustrate this, I want to take you inside a world which I hope is unfamiliar to most of you: that of the neo-natal intensive care unit, or NICU (pronounced “nick-you”). Specifically, I want to tell you a couple stories from the Canadian NICU experience. One, highlighted by Mark Steyn a couple months ago, comes from Hamilton, Ontario:
Hamilton’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) was full when Ava Isabella Stinson was born 14 weeks premature at St. Joseph’s Hospital Thursday at 12:24 p.m.
A provincewide search for an open NICU bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two-pound, four-ounce preemie to Buffalo that evening.
Steyn comments,
Well, it would be unreasonable to expect Hamilton, a city of half-a-million people just down the road from Canada’s largest city (Greater Toronto Area, 5.5 million) in the most densely populated part of Canada’s most populous province (Ontario, 13 million people) to be able to offer the same level of neonatal care as Buffalo, a post-industrial ruin in steep population decline for half a century.
Unfortunately, as Steyn goes on to point out, whenever the Canadian government starts outsourcing its health care to the US, that creates additional complications:
When a decrepit and incompetent Canadian health bureaucracy meets a boneheaded and inhuman American border “security” bureaucracy, you’ll be getting a birth experience you’ll treasure forever:
Her parents, Natalie Paquette and Richard Stinson, couldn’t follow their baby because as of June 1, a passport is required to cross the border into the United States. They’re having to approve medical procedures over the phone and are terrified something will happen to their baby before they get there.
Once Buffalo enjoys the benefits of Hamilton-level health care, I wonder where Ontario will be shipping the preemies to. Costa Rica?
The other story I want to tell you is my own. Our oldest daughter has dual US/Canadian citizenship by virtue of having been born in Vancouver, BC; I was a student in the country at the time, so we spent five years as net beneficiaries of the Canadian health care system. I’m not going to demonize it or try to deny its virtues; combined with the medical benefits my wife received for her job, she was without question our cheapest baby despite spending the first two weeks of her life in the NICU. Yet, as I wrote last summer, there were some enormous downsides to the system as well.
We had some truly brilliant doctors, and some wonderful nurses, and the staff at BC Children’s Hospital were beyond superb; they cared deeply about their tiny patients and were past masters at making bricks without straw. The thing is, they had to be.
The equipment was junk—they finally gave up on the blood-oxygen monitor on my little baby and took it off when it reported a heart rate of 24 and a blood-oxygen level of 0 (or the other way around—it’s been a few years now); while we were there, the provincial government tried to donate some of its used medical equipment, and no one would take it. The Sun quoted one veterinarian as saying the ultrasound they wanted to give him wasn’t good enough to use on his horses. Meanwhile, the doctors kept taking “reduced activity days,” or RADs (which is to say, they took scheduled one-day strikes without calling them strikes), to protest their contract. I was actually up at St. Paul’s in Vancouver for a scan one of those days; the techs were there, obviously, but no doctors. A hospital with no doctors is a very strange place.
I could also tell you about the time we took our daughter to the ER (different hospital) at midnight; there were only a few patients there at the time, but it still took them three hours just to get us into a room, and another hour to see us. It was 5am before we walked out the front door. At that, we were the lucky ones—there were a couple folks still waiting to be seen who’d been waiting when we got there.
Nor was our experience unusual, or even extreme; we prayed for people’s friends or family members dealing with serious illness, not just that they would get better, but simply that they would get treatment before they died. Sometimes they didn’t. That’s why (as I noted in that post) there’s an increasing movement against national health care in Canada and elsewhere (though not, as far as I understand, in Britain). That’s the kind of thing that happens when the dollar, not human life, is the bottom line of the health care system. We already have too much of that in our country as it is; what Sarah Palin understands, and why she’s leading the charge against Obamacare, is that letting the government run the system will only make it worse, not better. Yes, we need change; but for that change to bring actual hope, it needs to be changefor the better. Obamacare is the wrong prescription.
(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)
Our sins are connected deep inside us, more than we see. We compartmentalize. We tell ourselves we can sin in one area and it will stay contained in that area. It’s easier to rationalize that way. But the reality of what we are and how we work is more subtle, more interrelated, more inevitable.
Ray Ortlund is right on with this. As a colleague of mine whom I greatly respect was noting the other day, we tend to have a very superficial view of sin that doesn’t go any deeper than “Well, I did this thing this afternoon and that was wrong”; we think of sin only in terms of discrete acts that are bad in themselves, and we miss the deeper attitudes of our hearts that are opposed to God.
In so doing, we miss the ways that that thing we did this afternoon affects all the rest of life, and the attitudes that corrupt even the “good” things that we do, and the fundamental orientation of our hearts toward self rather than toward God . . . we focus on individual acts and ignore the part of ourselves that has to die if we are to be faithful followers of Christ. In medical terms, we focus on the symptoms and miss the disease.
Here’s another gem from Tyler Dawn I wanted to share:
Sometimes kids open doors to great spiritual truths.
Matt and Andy were in the living room doing, whatever, I can’t remember. Just a normal afternoon, when Matt says something out of the blue, “God can do anything He wants to do, COOL!”
“Yes, but He doesn’t.”
“Huh?”
“God can do anything He wants, He has unlimited power—but He doesn’t just go around doing whatever he wants. Only toddlers do that!”
And, I thought ruefully, many of us grownups too. How many of us use our desires as an excuse to satisfy the whim of the moment? . . .
How many times did God want to kill off the Israelites? Probably more times than Moses recorded. But He didn’t, because He does not live to satisfy His whims. Such is not the province of one worthy either of being worshipped or of being followed. . . .
The power of God is so unlimited and overwhelming, that if His love was not fully in control of it that we would just cease to exist without His even having to give it much of a thought.
That’s all too true. All of life, even the fact that we continue to live, is only by God’s grace and patient forbearance, only because he doesn’t want anyone to perish, but desires that all should come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). Without that, we’d all be long time gone.
“This president I think has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again, who has a deep seated hatred for . . . white people? Or the white culture?” [Glenn] Beck asked. “I don’t know what it is, but you can’t sit in a pew with [former Obama pastor] Jeremiah Wright for 20 years and not hear some of that stuff, have it wash over.” . . .
“I’m not saying that he doesn’t like white people,” Beck said. “I’m saying he has a problem. This guy, I believe, is a racist. Look at the things that he has been surrounded by.”
Predictably, Beck’s off hand remarks created a storm of controversy in the leftwing blogosphere, the same group that had been apologists for the Rev. Wright’s statements of hate against whites and Jews.
Color of Change, which claims to be the largest African-American political organization online with 600,000 members, has seized on Beck’s comment to mount a campaign to discourage companies from advertising on the program.
Color of Change Executive Director James Rucker spoke with Newsmax, and made clear his organization’s goal is for Beck’s voice to be silenced.
“It’s preposterous and absurd,” Rucker says of Beck’s opinion. “It’s insulting to black Americans; and it corrupts honest debate. Anyone who uses such a platform to spew such vitriol, whether Glenn Beck or anyone else, has no place on the air, and we at Color Of Change would use every resource available to us to remove corporate sponsorship from their platform.”
Newsmax, in reporting on this, is most interested in the possibility that the Obama administration is behind this attack, since a former head of Color of Change (one of its co-founders) is a member of the administration; certainly, that possibility is completely consonant with Barack Obama’s typical approach to dissent, and that of his followers. It’s worrisome, no question, especially because it fits a building pattern of behavior.
For my part, though, I’m more interested in the truly invidious double standard here. For Glenn Beck to call the president a racist is a horrible, terrible, intolerable thing; indeed, his attackers seem to be saying, to suggest that any black person is a racist is insulting to black people. For his attackers to suggest that he’s a racist, and to do so at length and in quite loaded terms, however, is perfectly acceptable. There’s no need to consider whether Beck has any justification for his assertion—whether Barack Obama’s 20 years of comfortable acceptance of high-voltage racist preaching might be meaningful, for example, or whether the president’s knee-jerk assumption that the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. must have been racist is in fact significant in understanding his mindset; they feel they can simply dismiss and denounce it as “insulting” “vitriol” without ever even having to disprove it.
Why? Because Glenn Beck is white and Barack Obama is black? I don’t see any other justification here (unless it’s the fact that Barack Obama is the President and Glenn Beck isn’t); and if that’s it, then aren’t they basing their conclusion solely on the respective colors of these men’s skins?
And isn’t that a textbook example of racism?
The heart of the matter
Not that I know God, but that he knows me.
Meditation on Holy Saturday and Easter
On the light of resurrection in a dead-grey world.
Bumper-sticker philosophy
Do people who say “question everything” really mean it?
Speaking prophetically
Critiquing the idea that the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. is a prophet of God.
Further thoughts on prophecy and Jeremiah Wright
On tests for a true prophet: risk, humility, and aim.
The fallacy of diagnosis
On why it’s wrong to identify other people as the problem.
I wasn’t out of touch with the world during our time away, just off the ‘Net for most of that time—but reading mediocre newspapers (which most of them are) and catching the occasional cable news show (sometimes with the sound off) doesn’t exactly give one a full-orbed view of current events; and then the first part of this week, I’ve been busy and occupied with other things, so it’s only been today that I’ve started to catch up a bit with the political news.
It’s interesting to see that Gov. Palin has pretty much gone mano a mano with President Obama over health care, defining the terms of the debate with her Facebook posts—to such an extent that even non-Palinites within the GOP are acknowledging that she’s taken the leadership of the party—and judging by the poll numbers, the Obama administration’s fixation on her, the recent market gains made by health insurers, and the decision of the Senate Finance Committee to drop consultations on end-of-life care from its version of the bill, it seems clear that she’s winning. Given that her op-ed on the cap-and-tax bill was a hammer blow to its political prospects, it would seem that Gov. Palin’s leadership has had a significant effect on the Obama administration’s legislative agenda.
Perhaps the most unnerving thing to happen during the last week or two was the White House’s decision to invite people to report on friends and neighbors who are opposed to Obamacare—something which doesn’t surprise me all that much, given the pattern of behaviorshown by Barack Obama and his coterie, but which is nevertheless concerning; on the bright side, at least it inspired a vintage effort from the redoubtable Mark Steyn in response.
As a result of all this, the polls aren’t being very kind to the president or his party. New Jersey is turning on his policies (and seems likely to put a Republican in the statehouse this fall), while Rasmussen is showing voters favoring the GOP on health care (and in fact on nearly every other issue as well) and the president’s approval ratings continuing to drop (just 47% approve, only 29% strongly, while 52% disapprove, including 65% of independents; on the bright side, only 37% strongly disapprove).
On a brighter note, it looks like our government has lost some of the bank bailout money:
Although hundreds of well-trained eyes are watching over the $700 billion that Congress last year decided to spend bailing out the nation’s financial sector, it’s still difficult to answer some of the most basic questions about where the money went.
Nice job, guys. That’s definitely the sort of thing to make people think twice about giving the feds even more money to play with. And in the meantime, as the government’s left trying to clean up the mess made by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, here comes their cousin Ginnie Mae to make a whole new one. Startlingly, Congress doesn’t see anything wrong with this (though if Ginnie Mae does indeed crash, they will no doubt look for some way to blame it on George W. Bush).
On the foreign policy front, the Marines have launched a major assault in Afghanistan; the incomparable Michael Yon reports (if you can get the video to work; I always have trouble with PJTV). I wish them well, but no foreign power has ever really won in Afghanistan, and I’m not confident we’ll be the first. (This, btw, was the problem with Senator Obama’s insistence that Iraq was the wrong war, that we should have been fighting in Afghanistan; fighting in Iraq drew al’Qaeda down from the mountains of Afghanistan to the deserts and streets of Iraq, where we could actually get at them.)
All this is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg of everything the president has to keep track of; and all we expect of our presidents is that they keep track of all of it and know what to do about all of it. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for them . . . if it weren’t for the fact that they did everything possible to put themselves in that position.
. . . this is the kind of thing we mean. I tend to think that there are folks out there through whom God decides to work in absolutely atypical ways, both because of who he’s made them to be and so that their lives would serve as reminders to the rest of us that he is in no wise limited to our conventional expectations or conventional wisdom; Tyler Dawn, I think, is one of those people. From my contact with her (all electronic, alas), I can say that she’s a remarkable woman of God with a remarkable faith who doesn’t fit any pattern any church I’ve ever run across would consider to be normal; that’s just her, and that’s just God. In this case, she has an amazing testimony of how God used her—through a series of hard and unpleasant and painful things—to expose a child molester and set a child free.
Go read it, and marvel at the hand of God; and after you’ve marveled a while, remember that what God’s on about in our lives is often something very different from what we’re on about, and in many cases something we can’t even see, because we don’t see the whole picture. What we think is the “A” plot of our lives right now might only really be a minor sub-plot, while God is at work telling a completely different story—and what is abject defeat in one might well be glorious victory in the other. Just as it was, as Tyler Dawn points out, for Joseph.
I was there when they crucified my Lord;
I held the scabbard when the soldier drew his sword.
I threw the dice when they pierced his side,
But I’ve seen love conquer the great divide.
—U2/B. B. King, “When Love Comes to Town”
OK, so I was on a bit of a U2 kick this trip. Even so, this is a great lyric, and something every Christian ought to be able to sing full-throated, with a full heart.
Since this is sort of Jared Wilson Day around these parts, it seems like a good time to note a superb little post of his from this past Monday. In dealing with the silly question “Can God make a rock so heavy he can’t lift it?” he said something very interesting, taking the question from an angle that had never occurred to me before and producing a truly profound response.
The truth is that God did make a weight so heavy he couldn’t lift it. He did so not by building an immovable force—we did that with our sin—but by incarnating the frailty of humanity and willingly subjecting himself to the force. As one of us, yet still himself, he created the conundrum of the incarnate God, bearing a cross he both ordained yet could not carry by himself, becoming condemned in death and also victorious. And God was crushed according to the plan he himself projected from the foundation of the world.
So, can God make a rock so heavy even he can’t lift it?
Yes. And he did. For three days only. And then he drop kicked it out of the mouth of the tomb.
Brilliant.