[Bret L]

Currently, it is common for 50% of a person's total lifetime medical
expenses to be spent in the last six months of their life. Very often
the person is bedridden and marginally or totally dysfunctional for
this length of time.

Prohibiting heroic measures for extending this level or quality of
life is a reasonable response by any society. The objection here is
often that it is _government_ which ultimately mey be empowered to
make this decision. Changing this means invoking separation of health
care and state.

For better or worse, this is politically untenable.

The fundamental intellectual dishonesty here is mostly on the part of
the nominal Right, the Respectable Right, and not the Left. The left
have engaged only in the most transparent efforts at prevarication
about this.

We are not libertarians. 98 to 99.9% of voters do not vote
Libertatrian. The LP has done us an enormous service in making it
explicit that no one wants laissez faire. No significant bnumber of
the electorate does.

Doctors, pharmacists, nurses, hospitals and old people's homes want,
demand, government regulation. The AMA is a union which has encoded
its whims, desires and in some cases _the sexual fetishes of Bourbon
kings_ into law in each of the States with an efficacy the Teamsters
could never conceive of or comprehend.

Most conservative tommyrot and bilge on this topic is transparent
pandering to the prolife nutters or a partisan fight for the choicest
table scraps.