iety that moves its basic value-producing industries overseas yetcontinues to manufacture artificial hearts at home. We have money to givesmokers heart transplants but no money to retool out steel mills. We trainmore doctors and lawyers than we need but fewer teachers. On any givenday, 30 to 40 percent of the hospital beds in America are empty, but ourclassrooms are overcrowded and our transportation systems aredeteriorating. We are great at treating sick people, but we are not that great at treating a sick economy. And we are not succeeding ininternational trade. When you really look around and try to findindustries the United States is succeeding in, you discover that they arevery few and far between.(Lamm 133) There is no way we are going to come to grips with this problem untilwe also look at some of these areas that aren't going to go away . One ofthe toughest of these is what Victor Fuchs called "flat-of-the-curvemedicine"- those medical procedures which are the highest in cost butachieve little or no improvement in health status. He says that they mustbe reduced or eliminated. We must demand that professional societies andlicensing authorities establish some norms and standards for diagnostic andtherapeutic practice that encompass both costs and medicine. We’re goingto 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 in aterminal cancer ward, It's grim b...
