We had a big controversy in the United States when there was a limited number of dialysis machines. In Seattle, they appointed what they called a 'God committee' to choose who should get it, and that committee was eventually abandoned. Society ended up paying the whole bill for dialysis instead of having people make those decisions.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the ethical dilemmas of healthcare resource allocation.
Ezekiel Emanuel reflects on a significant ethical controversy concerning the allocation of limited medical resources, such as dialysis machines, in the United States. The formation of the so-called 'God committee' aimed to determine who would receive treatment, raising questions about morality in healthcare decisions. Ultimately, the choice to have society collectively bear the cost of dialysis underscores the complexity of equitable healthcare access and the debate over life and death decisions in medical ethics.
In practice
In discussions about healthcare policies, this quote could illustrate the need for ethical considerations in resource allocation.
There's nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, in trying to bend every child to match a one-size-fits-all notion of what it means to be a boy or girl of a specific age. Better to set a few parameters and then go with the flow. Call it 'jazz parenting.'
Patients who are being kept alive by technology and want to end their lives already have a recognized constitutional right to stop any and all medical interventions, from respirators to antibiotics. They do not need physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia.
As an academic, what do you have? You have the quality of your work and the integrity with which you do it.
The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects.
Our dad hugged us and kissed us so much that some friends and relatives complained that he was going to turn us into sissies or homosexuals. But my dad didn't care. Let them raise their kids in a reserved and reticent way. He grew up in Israel, and his boys were going to be hugged and kissed by their father and know they were loved.
Childhood vaccines are one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. Indeed, parents whose children are vaccinated no longer have to worry about their child's death or disability from whooping cough, polio, diphtheria, hepatitis, or a host of other infections.
Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. It seems almost as if progress itself and our fight against the increase of entropy intrinsically must end in the downhill path from which we are trying to escape.
Imperialism is a system of exploitation that occurs not only in the brutal form of those who come with guns to conquer territory. Imperialism often occurs in more subtle forms, a loan, food aid, blackmail . We are fighting this system that allows a handful of men on earth to rule all of humanity.
The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom.
Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.
Among irrational animals the love of the offspring and of the parents for each other is extraordinary because God, who created them, compensated for the deficiency of reason by the superiority of their senses.
Without restoring an ethos of social responsibility, there can be no meaningful and sustained economic recovery.
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