Intelligence Squared Debates posits the argument: Should the United States ration end-of-life car?
Taking place at Chicago Ideas Week: Just because we can extend life, should we? The U.S. is expected to spend $2.8 trillion on health care in 2012. Medicare alone will cost taxpayers $590 billion, with over 25% going toward patients in their last year of life. If health care is a scarce resource, limited by its availability and our ability to pay for it, should government step in to ration care, deciding whose life is worth saving? In other words, how much is an extra month of life worth?
*Panelists subject to change
Moderator: John Donvan
Author & Correspondent
ABC News
For:
Dr. Art Kellermann
Chair in Policy Analysis
RAND Health
Peter Singer
Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics
Princeton University
Against:
Sally Pipes
President and Chief Executive Officer
Pacific Research Institute
Ken Connor
Chairman
Center for a Just Society
Bio
Ken Connor
In 2005, Ken Connor founded the Center for a Just Society, where he serves as the organization’s Chairman. Connor is affiliated with the law firm of Connor & Connor, LLC, a firm nationally known for its successful representation of victims of nursing home abuse and neglect. He served as Counsel to Governor Jeb Bush in Bush v. Schiavo, one of the country’s most watched cases in the long-running legal battle to protect a severely disabled woman, Terri Schindler Schiavo, from a court order to remove her feeding tube. Because of his advocacy on behalf of nursing home residents, the state’s Democratic Attorney General appointed him to Florida’s Task Force on the Availability and Affordability of Long Term Care.
John Donvan
John Donvan is a correspondent for ABC News Nightline. He has served as ABC White House Correspondent, along with postings in Moscow, London, Jerusalem and Amman.
Dr. Art Kellermann
Arthur Kellermann holds the Paul O'Neill Alcoa Chair in Policy Analysis at the RAND Corporation. Before joining RAND, he was a Professor of Emergency Medicine and Public Health and Associate Dean for health policy at the Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta. Kellermann founded Emory's Department of Emergency Medicine and served as its first chair from 1999 to 2007. As a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow, Kellermann worked for the professional staff of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, U.S. House of Representatives. A clinician and researcher, he practiced and taught emergency medicine for more than 25 years.
Sally Pipes
Sally Pipes is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Pacific Research Institute (PRI), a San Francisco-based think tank founded in 1979. In November 2010, she was named the Taube Fellow in Health Care Studies. Prior to becoming President of PRI in 1991, she was Assistant Director of the Fraser Institute, based in Vancouver, Canada. Pipes' latest book, The Pipes Plan: The Top Ten Ways to Dismantle and Replace Obamacare, is a follow-up on her book The Truth About Obamacare (2010). She writes a weekly health care column called “Piping Up” for Forbes.com.
Peter Singer
Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He specializes in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, preference utilitarian perspective. Singer is well-known for his book, Animal Liberation, a canonical text in animal rights/liberation theory. From 2005 on, Singer has also held the part-time position of Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne, in the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics.
Arguing for the motion, Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, provides his strategy for effectively rationing end-of-life care.
Sally Pipes, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Pacific Research Institute, and Dr. Art Kellermann, Chair at Policy Analysis RAND Health, argue about the impact of single payer healthcare rationing on America's poor and uninsured.
Ken Connor, Chairman of the Center for a Just Society, Dr. Art Kellermann, Chair at Policy Analysis RAND Health, and Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, argue what the role of government should be in healthcare, and how free markets influence the nature of care.