Politics

Cats

Terry Sanville

"We'll start her on three units of ProZinc, twice a day," the young vet told us. "Bring her back in a week and we'll do another glucose curve." She looked worried.

I petted our skinny little cat and she purred immediately, grateful to escape the brutes that had been jabbing needles in her veins all day. My wife and I moved to the animal clinic's front counter to pay our bill - a day's worth of blood sugar tests, a vial of insulin, syringes.

"Holy mother of..."

As I gazed at the computer-printed bill, the receptionist flashed a weak smile and said wryly, "It is what it is..."

Yikes!

Over the next few days, friends asked me about our 13-year-old feline's condition. When I complained about the costs, one mentioned the animal's age and said maybe it was time to "let her go." Euthanizing a furry friend is heartbreaking. But the notion got my mind spinning:

Is the high cost of veterinary care a good reason to end her life?

If my cat had a richer owner, would she have a greater right to live?

These questions are anything but academic to me, since our cat has the same chronic disease that I do - we're both insulin-dependant diabetics with health care costs that will continue until our last breaths. But over the following days, as our national health-care debate devolved into a swirling morass of finger-pointing, dogmatic proclamations, and stalemates, I knew that I wasn't just thinking about cats, but exploring the nasty ethical question of financial determinism.

Should a person's survival depend on their ability to pay for health care?

If America doesn't make health care affordable, are we sanctioning financial determinism and the deaths of poor and working class people?

These ethical questions seem to get buried in the rhetoric as complaints about government "death squads," budget and taxation impacts, and shifts from so-called free market services to socialistic services intensify. In America's first major declaration, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness formed the cornerstone of our national character. But isn't life the most basic, the most important? Shouldn't it at least be held on an equal footing with liberty - often cited as the moral basis for massive military spending? Why aren't we as outraged about health care costs and the untimely deaths of our citizens as we are with the Taliban and Al Qaeda? Maybe the uninsured just die too quietly...and they never get enough press.

Yet every day some citizen must decide whether to pay for expensive care and medicine or purchase food and shelter. Others can't afford the medicine they need because a particular drug isn't on their insurance company's formulary. Still others have their liberty and happiness crushed as the cost of illness or major injury gobbles their savings, their homes, and their family's future. Some must forego treatment because insurance administrators determine it is experimental or has not proven effective (I guess we already have death squads!). And then there are those desperate souls who can't afford the ever-increasing cost of health services or insurance and end their lives rather than burden their families with debt.

Does anybody really believe that financial determinism should guide America's national health care policy? Apparently, some do. Which gets me back to my first question: is the high cost of health services a good reason to kill my cat? There's that nasty indirect euthanasia issue again. Maybe our country should ratify a more self-centered and direct approach and place the old, the sick, the financially-strapped masses on quickly melting arctic ice flows and send them into the mist. Failure to adopt a national health care program will do just that.

When the number of folks on thin ice only included the poor, financial determinism could hide its ugly head in the political weeds - after all, "the poor will always be with us." But as the baby boomer population ages and younger households are faced with unemployment, high education and energy costs, and upside down mortgages, the impact of unaffordable health care strikes at a much larger population segment, one that will likely grow.

So, if we believe life is important and that every American has the right to it, then who should pay for health care? We all should! To do so would be a reaffirmation of those truths we hold as self-evident. If we don't fix our health care system, then the divide between the haves and have nots will broaden - and our moral compass will spin wildly for years to come. Even my cat deserves better than that.