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Friday, July 31, 2009

What might Hayek have said about Ezekiel Emanuel's "fair distribution of life years"

I do not claim to be an expert on the incredibly insightful writing of Friederick Hayek and certainly do not really know what he would said in regard to the system of allocation of health care that Dr. Emanuel and his co-authors at the NIH have proposed.(See here for their Jan 2009 Lancet article in which they describe and advocate for their "life years" system) but this quote from Hayek seems appropriate:


-->…the conception of a ‘value to society’ is sometimes carelessly used even by economists… there is strictly speaking no such thing and the expression implies [a] sort of anthropomorphism or personification of society…Services can have value only to particular people (or an organization), and any particular service will have very different values for different members of society. To regard them differently is to treat society not as a spontaneous order of free men but as an organization whose members are all made to serve a single hierarchy of ends (Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 2., p.75).







3 comments:

MedicalSoundProofingSolutions said...

nonsense

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Bill Baar said...

great quote.. perfect

Some reall think there is such a think as "value to society" but unable to locate it the test becomes instead value to the party, the state, the Chicago Regular Democratic Organization. That's the reality that turns the young Socialist or Liberal into tomorrows neo-Con.

Assuming they survive the upward slope on Dr Zeke's graph should HR 3200 come to pass.

Thanks for some great posts here.