hing fundamentally unsustainable about a society that moves its basic value-producing industries overseas yet continues to manufacture artificial hearts at home. We have money to give smokers heart transplants but no money to retool out steel mills. We train more doctors and lawyers than we need but fewer teachers. On any given day, 30 to 40 percent of the hospital beds in America are empty, but our classrooms are overcrowded and our transportation systems are deteriorating. We are great at treating sick people, but we are not that great at treating a sick economy. And we are not succeeding in international trade. When you really look around and try to find industries the United States is succeeding in, you discover that they are very few and far between.(Lamm 133) There is no way we are going to come to grips with this problem until we also look at some of these areas that aren't going to go away . One of the toughest of these is what Victor Fuchs called "flat-of-the-curve medicine"- those medical procedures which are the highest in cost but achieve little or no improvement in health status. He says that they must be reduced or eliminated. We must demand that professional societies and licensing authorities establish some norms and standards for diagnostic and therapeutic practice that encompass both costs and medicine. We’re going to have to come up with some sort of concept of cost-effective medicine. Individuals have the right to decide about their own lives and deaths. What more basic right is there than to decide if you're going to live? There is none. A person under a death sentence who's being kept alive, through so called heroic measures certainly has a fundamental right to say, "Enough's enough. The treatment's worse than the disease. Leave me alone. Let me die!". Ironically, those who deny the terminally ill this right do so out of a sense of high morality. The period of suffering can be shortened. If you have ever been...
