Panelists Thomas Murray, Peter Barland, Mary Ann Baily and Trudy Lieberman discuss the moral aspect of the current healthcare debate.
They examine the ethical issues involved in healthcare policy, the economics of health reform, the ethics of the way the debate is being conducted and reported, and physicians' perspectives on these issues.
Bio
Mary Ann Baily
Mary Ann Baily, Research Scholar, joined the research staff of The Hastings Center in October 2000. She is currently a Staff Investigator on The Hastings Center Guidelines on End-of-Life Care project. She was the Project Manager on "Ethical Decision-Making for Newborn Genetic Screening," a project funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and completed in 2007, and the Principal Investigator on "The Ethics of Improving Health Care Quality & Safety," a project funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ) and completed in 2006. From 2005 to 2006, she was a member of an Institute of Medicine Committee on Increasing Rates of Organ Donation.
Dr. Peter Barland
Peter Barland, M.D., is Professor of Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the director of Rheumatology for Montefiore Hospital in New York. He is also the Director of Montefiore's Immunodiagnostic Laboratory. A graduate of Einstein, where he also trained, Peter was the recipient of the Arthritis Foundation's four year Research Training Fellowship. In recognition of his contributions to rheumatology, the Arthritis Foundation (New York Chapter) honored Dr. Barland in 1996 with its prestigious Charles M. Plotz Award.
Trudy Lieberman
Trudy Lieberman is the Director of the Health & Medicine Reporting Program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. She is the former director of the Center for Consumer Health Choices at Consumers Union, is a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review and a contributor to The Nation. She began her career as a consumer writer at the Detroit Free Press. Lieberman has authored five books including Slanting the Story: the Forces That Shape the News (2000) and Consumer Reports Guide to Health Services for Seniors (2000), named one of the year's best consumer health books by Library Journal.
Thomas H. Murray
Thomas H. Murray is President of The Hastings Center. Dr. Murray was formerly the Director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics in the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was also the Susan E. Watson Professor of Bioethics. He is a founding editor of the journal Medical Humanities Review, and is on the editorial boards of The Hastings Center Report; Human Gene Therapy; Politics and the Life Sciences; Cloning, Science, and Policy; Medscape General Medicine; Teaching Ethics; Journal of Bioethical Inquiry and the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics. He served as President of the Society for Health and Human Values and of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.
Doctors are not getting preferred treatment in the healthscare debate. Health"care" has become a ponzi scheme, with insurance and hospitals working together to decide what a person pays for services. If payment is in cash, the cost is much lesser than if payment is provided by insurance - a Tylenol given in the hospital should not cost several dollars.
The only was to stop stealing of wealth in health care seems to be individual health savings accounts - this is not a irrational idea, although many seem to think the individual can't care for himself - therefore we have Obama"care".
The elites will be glad to tell us how to live, as they have for decades - and those of us that would rather try to stop the corruption will have to live with results of the apathy of those that won't admit America is getting remade into a more socialistic state with totalitarian/Marxist controls.
How does a population earning 30-40K/year afford health care provided by doctors earning hundreds of thousands of dollars? The answer is... they can't.
Insurance can only pool risk. If everyone needs a 100k health procedure at some point their life then people need to contribute 100k through their policy.
Hey, we could all have affordable health care if doctors earned 80K/year. But that's not happening. I'm not suggesting doctors don't deserve their salary for their work. But we can only pay them what we earn. I'm very cynical of doctor who just seem to want infinite funds going into their industry (yes... it is an industry).
You will never hear doctors talk of letting nurse practitioners handle lesser cases to reduce costs and other such cost reduction measures.
Medical care is just plain expensive. However, let us remember that the state grants doctors and other health organization a priveleged role in society. Only they can prescribe and perform medical procedures. In exchange for this monopoly status we give them, we should be able to impose price controls on them.
Of course, they could give up their monopoly and compete freely in a real market, but that's not happening.
member. 
