Valuing Seniors' Lives

Valuing Seniors' Lives


Posted 06/06/2011 07:03 PM ET

Reform: The administration's regulatory czar tries to disavow his statement that a program that saves young people is better than one that saves their parents and grandparents. It's called rationing, and its name is ObamaCare.

A commercial showing granny being pushed over a cliff by a person resembling Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., was recently put out by the Agenda Project, implying that the Ryan budget will kill old people by changing Medicare.

For the sake of accuracy, granny should have been dispatched by a character resembling Cass Sunstein, President Obama's head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

The Ryan budget attempts to curb the explosive growth of entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security so they are there for granny without burdening the grandchildren with unconscionable debt. Sunstein, as was pointed out during congressional testimony last Friday, literally believes granny should be sacrificed in favor of the kids.

In testimony before the House energy and commerce subcommittees on oversight and investigations, the 56-year-old Sunstein tried to walk back comments he made in a 2003 paper, "Lives, Life-years, and Willingness to Pay," written while he was a professor at Obama's one-time home, the University of Chicago.

Rather than ensuring that everyone get the best care possible, Sunstein wrote that government should rely instead on the "value of a statistical life year" (VSLY), which would likely result in significantly lower benefit calculations for elderly people and significantly higher benefits for children.

Government would assign a dollar value to your life in terms of what it's worth, and if you exceeded that limit, well, too bad. Britain's National Health Service has a similar measure of cost-effectiveness called the "quality adjusted life year" to see if your life is worth saving.

In the paper, Sunstein said, "I urge that the government should indeed focus on statistical life years rather than statistical lives. A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people." He added that under the VSLY approach, "Older people are treated worse for one reason, they are older. This is not an injustice."

It isn't? When the man who would provide input into the establishment of the Independent Payment Advisory Board that would supervise cost reductions for Medicare got caught for suggesting seniors are expendable, Sunstein said he was "not sure what I think about what that young man wrote." Sunstein was 48 at the time. As for being "not sure," we are talking about people's lives here, Mr. Sunstein.