My friend Wendy is DEAD: she couldn't buy broccoli

[haele]

60. I'll try to be a bit more kind but the wording of your post did not come out well.

While it is true that no one lives forever, there is a lot of wiggle room as to when the body stops living.
The discussion brought by the OP was not "woe, my friend is dead", but "my friend couldn't afford to access the health care that would enable her to live another ten years with a quality of life."

For the discussion "my friend just died" the bringing the fact that Steve Jobs died even with his money and vegetarianism might be a bit crass to the person with a loss, but is a simple observation. A stark sentence - "when it's time for us to go, it's time for us to go." is one of the kinder comments I would expect for Dick Cheney, but I would definitely not expect the person who is grieving to deal kindly with that. It is not a comfort to those grieving, and it is not necessary for someone who is otherwise not in the public eye.
I have lost loved ones in my life - the "God's will" or "It was his/her time" comments always struck me as either cruel or patronizingly belittling.

But this was not the discussion. The discussion is that there was treatment available for Wendy, who tried to live a healthy lifestyle and did as much as she could to be healthy to extend her life. The problem was, she couldn't afford the same care Steve Jobs or someone's trust fund baby or trophy wife could that could extend life a bit more or make her able to function up to the end. Because she didn't have availability to the same amount of money, she was basically told she wasn't as important as Steve Jobs. Heck, she was told that once she spent all her hard-earned assets and those of people who loved her, she was basically expendable. Basically - spend all your money until you are homeless and live any additional time that would otherwise be available to you without comfort or dignity because you have the termanity to believe you should have the same quality of life as one of the top 1%.

Here's the real life example of this argument I have -
My father-in-law is wealthy. His current wife - a very nice woman, but she's still basically a professional wife who's life work has been to run fund-raisers and throw great parties - has a serious blood disorder she developed about 4 years ago. They were able to pay the additional money to get a solid diagnosis (around $200K plus insurance, from what I remember) and can afford the $50K a year or so they are spending out of pocket on top of their very good insurance to treat her at three different top quality medical centers.
She's expected to be able to survive comfortably for another twenty years or so because of that treatment.

If I had developed the same blood disorder she has when she did, the fact is that even with my company insurance, I would be dying right now while attmpting to continue to work full time (because my employer is good about that if you need to continue coverage) and raise a family while I was sick and weak just to keep that insurance and a paycheck coming in - and I would still be dead within 6 months. That is, if I hadn't already succumed to the stress and passed.
There's no way we would be able to afford the care to help me survive, and we'd just barely be able to afford the palliative care to keep me comfortable until "my time came". On top of that, my survivors would still be on the hook for my outstanding long-term medical bills - which would probably take a good third out of my life insurance that they would need to keep going after I'm gone.

Trust me, if Steve Jobs didn't have the money he did, he would have died 15 years before he did, because he couldn't purchase the attention he could with the money he had on hand.

That's the problem in a nutshell. In a system that dispenses quality of life by the amount of profit they can make off you, a good person without wealth who could be making a positive contribution to the world in general has no chance to have the same access that some lazy, pampered scion of a "Captain of Industry" can command.

The question becomes "what is a life worth?" If your access to health care and programs that can improve your length quality of life is based on the amount of money you can bring to the table, then your life is worth what you can buy, not what you could be or accomplish if you had a quality of life.

Americans stopped being Citizens once we became regularly known to Government as "Consumers". Even the term "Taxpayer" suggests that one's value as a Citizen is only worth what you can afford to give the government for your services.


Haele