Cass Sunstein Believes Your Internal Organs Are Government Property
Van Jones, one of President Barack Obama’s controversial czars, is out. Now, barely two days later, the radical views of another Obama nominee are coming to light. As reported Monday on Fox News by Brian Sullivan, host of Your World, Cass Sunstein, Obama’s choice to head up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is advocating a plan whereby Americans would automatically have their organs harvested after death. (Sunstein has already raised eyebrows with his extremist views on regulating human behavior and his belief that animals should be able to sue humans).
Under Sunstein’s latest proposal, you could become an organ donor and not even know it.
The way organ donation works today, doctors and hospitals can only harvest your organs when you (or a spouse or relative of yours after your death) issue specific authorization (such as checking the organ donor box on your driver’s license) allowing them to do so. Sunstein wants to make it an “opt-out decision,” whereby your organs would be taken after death whether it’s what you wanted or not, unless you specifically opt-out.
The idea of automatic organ harvesting was outlined last year in a book Sunstein co-authored with Richard H. Thaler entitled Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Sunstein and Thaler argue that not enough people are donating organs because the decision to donate is left up to them.
That, they say, is why doctors and hospital officials would be better able to make the choice for you. Their doing so would spare you from having to make the decision and would not place your loved ones in the difficult position of trying to determine what your wishes would have been. From the book:
- “The major obstacle to increasing [organ] donations is the need to get the consent of surviving family members.”
- “Presumed consent preserves freedom of choice, but it is different from explicit consent because it shifts the default rule. Under this policy, all citizens would be presumed to be consenting donors, but they would have the opportunity to register their unwillingness to donate.”
- “The next of kin can be approached quite differently when the decedent’s silence is presumed to indicate a decision to donate rather than when it is presumed to indicate a decision not to donate. This shift may make it easier for the family to accept organ donation.”
This idea of a “mandated choice,†where the government will force you to make a decision or will decide for you about such an important issue, is something that would bring tears of admiration to the members of the National People’s Congress in Communist China.
Sunstein and Thaler admit that there will be opposition to this idea, but nothing insurmountable:
Another [problem] is that it is a hard sell politically. More than a few people object to the idea of ‘presuming’ anything when it comes to such a sensitive matter. For these reasons we think that the best choice architecture for organ donations is mandated choice.
The bottom line, then, is that under Sunstein’s plan, the government would have the last say in what should happen to your organs after you die, as you are deemed too stupid to be trusted to make the right decision:
The false assumption is that almost all people, almost all of the time, make choices that are in their best interest or at the very least are better than the choices that would be made [for them] by someone else.
The president has asked us to judge him based upon whom he surrounds himself with.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
All I can say about these people is, “WAY OUT”.
This seems to be the latest tactic by the left to get what they want. The state of Washington, run by Democrats, changed the opt-in requirement to collect an extra $5 fee when renewing vehicle licenses to an opt-out requirement. Supporters figured at least 50% of the people are too lazy to read the fine print and will pay the extra fee believing it is a requirement rather than a choice. When the state receives additional revenue from this tactic used for vehicle licenses, they will use it to garner revenue from other sources.
In our state, they sales-taxed the full amount of the vehicles sold under the “Cash for Clunkers” program. In effect, taxing the rebate.
It’s amazing how swindlers work, isn’t it?
Scare tactics from the right wing.
When our 19 year old died 15 years ago as the result of auto accident we donated her organs so other people could live. Her heart recipient sill lives a full life. I know that “D” on your licence is not a legal order – only a indication of you wishes. The opt-out only affects what is put on you licence not the actual decision for transplantion. That would remain with family.
This reminds of the book, Coma, by Robin Cook, which I read years ago, in which doctors would place patients into comatose for the nefarious purpose of harvesting their body parts.
The United States is a whole lot closer to presumed consent than most people know. Most people think you’re assumed not to be an organ donor unless you sign up to be one. That used to be true, but it’s not true any more.
Under the 2006 Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, an organ procurement organization (OPO) can assume you are an organ donor while they search for evidence of your true intentions. They can hook you up to artificial life support machines to keep your organs fresh, even if your advance healthcare directive says you don’t want artificial life support. They can ask your family for permission to harvest your organs. They can ask a government bureaucrat for permission if they can’t find your family. They can do all this even if the “organ donor” box on your driver’s license is blank.
The 2006 UAGA has been enacted in 39 states and the District of Columbia, including eight of the ten largest states by population (California, Texas, New York, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, and North Carolina). Over 80% of the U.S. population lives in states that have enacted this law.
The 2006 UAGA stacks the deck against people who don’t want to be organ donors. Unless your decision not to donate is documented in exactly the right way, OPOs can ignore your decision and ask your family or a government official to overturn it.
State organ donor registries, which OPOs must search under the 2006 UAGA, are also biased against non-donors. None of them, not a single one, will record your decision not to donate. They literally won’t take “no†for an answer.
DoNotTransplant.com operates the only online donor registry that allows you to say “no†to organ donation in a way that will stand up under the 2006 UAGA. OPOs are required under the law to check this registry. If they find your name in the registry, they’re legally forbidden from harvesting your organs.
The main problem is that our legislators have allowed Health Care to become so corrupt that know one knows where to begin and certainly, they don’t, for they refuse to address the real problems.
Which is the same problems we are dealing with in our government.
THEY DON’T ADMIT THEY’RE WRONG.
we ought to mandate that any one who tries to change this great country into Communistic one (ie:Obama, Reid, Pelosi), we will harvest their organs while they are still alive!
You did the right thing when you lost your daughter, IMHO.
But the operative principle here was that only you had the right to make that decision.
Go Google the word’s liberty & freedom.. you obviously need a refresher course.
You have every right to do what you think is right for you and your family.
Why can’t you accept the fact that other’s have the same right ?
Here’s an idea, just off the top of my head…
Lot’s of potential organ donors show up in municipal emergency rooms. I’m betting that a huge % of them aren’t capable of paying for the medical services they receive, unless thy arrive already dead.
How about a clause on the consent for services form stating that unless the patient or a family member of the patient can provide immediate proof of their ability to pay for the treatment, then in order to be treated, they must agree that in the event they don’t survive, that they consent to the hospital’s right to use their organs to help other injured or sick people.
Since the taxpayers are providing the funding for those municipal hospitals, aren’t they entitled to get something back for their investment ?
Creative but probably too problematic to work. How many people show up to the emergency room unconscious?
There you go; giving legislators an extra page to add to their health bill.
Actually, I was just thinking about alternative ways that we could improve the system once we get the socialists and communists out of our government..
There are some real problems in the health care field, don’t you agree ?
How would you fix them ?
We should make it against the law to get sick. Outlaw viruses and bacteria. That’ll solve the problem. Just pass a law against it. Oh wait am I slipping back and becoming leftist Dave again?
There are all kinds of problems in the health care field. Which should we tackle first? The high cost? The number of people uninsured? How much HMOS SUCK? Where to begin?
David.. you’ve got a marketable idea there:
“We should make it against the law to get sick. ”
The far left will eat it up… Why not ? They’re already trying to legislate the climate.
At the risk of being politically incorrect on a MASSIVE scale however, here’s a few suggestion about what we can do to fix the problem, after we get rid of the socialists & communists of course, and all based on the idea of preventing government from interfering with personal decisions, and engaging in income redistribution.
The following ideas are not necessarily in their order of importance.
Shut down medicare & medicade by purchasing private health care bonds or prepaid lifetime insurance
policies for those who have paid into the system ONLY. The companies who win the bids for those contracts must be kept under very careful scrutiny until all of those policies expire. The government made a deal with the people who paid into the system and that deal must be honored. It will come at a steep price, but nowhere near as much as Obamacare will ultimately cost, and, it will not continue indefinitely.
If people choose not to purchase their own healthcare insurance, and fail to pay for the health care they receive, a system must be introduced that will automatically give both municipal & private medical providers a lien against the recipient’s wages until his debt has been paid off in full. If the debt is not paid in a reasonable period of time, the provider would get a lien against the recipient’s real property (real estate & vehicles) Watch how many of those folks start paying for their own insurance when that happens.
If an insurance company tries to deny a claim unfairly, a system should be in place through which the insured can get a judgment from an oversight authority VERY quickly, since patients can suffer greatly if the care they need is not provided in a timely manner. When an insurance company’s denial is overturned by the oversight authority, the insurance company should be forced to pay a very serious penalty to the insured. Watch how fast the improper denial of services rate decreases when that happens.
We must deny any type of healthcare to all illegal immigrants, including children of illegal aliens who were born here to illegal parents. Let their church and other private charities take care of them. It worked before, and if we dramatically cut the tax burden of the most productive members of our society, the amount of charitable giving will go through the roof. Watch what happens to the flow of illegals across our borders when they realize that they can’t come here for a free lunch anymore.
We must deny access to municipal hospital emergency rooms to vagrants, unless they’ve been run over by a police car. There’s no reason why hard working taxpayers should have to pay huge amounts of money to care for people who chose to spend their life smoking, drinking or doing drugs. The VA should have some kind of hospice facility for those who have served. Let the Salvation Army take care of the rest of them, & if they die, they die. I’m having a tough enough time taking care of my loved ones. I don’t really care those others anymore.
Eliminate fraud by criminalizing fraudulent conduct in the healthcare arena with mandatory jail time as well as treble damages. If we can eliminate medicare & medicaid, however, we probably won’t have much of a fraud problem anymore. All the major fraud scandals we’ve heard about after all, were made possible by the incredibly inept way in which government has run medicare & medicade. If anyone has forgotten what’s been happening, Google the details about the scam perpetrated on the government by Richard Rainwater who owned Columbia HCA.
http://justice.gov/opa/pr/2003/June/03_civ_386.htm
The government literally invited this fraud by setting the system up so that providers who over-billed medicare & medicade, which Columbia intentionally did on a massive scale, when and if discovered only had to pay back the actual overcharges free of any interest or penalties. Another name for that is a “free loan†How could they lose ?
It is essential that we drastically change the medical malpractice system, and stop parasitic lawyers from feeding off a system designed by lawyers, for the exclusive benefit of lawyers, with no consideration for the clients or any reasonable standards of what’s just.
First, we should ban advertising by ambulance chasers, and deny people who get free health care from both municipal and private providers, the right to sue their providers over said healthcare. I’m not sure about how we can put rational limits on malpractice awards, but there must be some rational standards that can be set. If a 45 year old who earns $35K gets disabled by virtue of a doctor’s or a hospital’s mistake, there’s simply no way that he’s entitled to a $100 Million award. If we restrict attorney’s fees to a high maximum market level hourly rate for the actual hours spent on successful cases, said fee to be paid directly to the attorneys by the losing party in addition to the plaintiff’s award (allowing plaintiffs to keep their entire awards), watch what happens to the number of spurious med-mal suits filed. If unemployment numbers for attorneys go through the roof, I don’t give a damn. Yes, malpractice attorneys are needed, but they tend to go overboard far too often, and in so doing they significantly increase the cost of everyone’s health care. John Edwards made over $400MM doing this in under 15 years of his med-mal practice. I rest my case.
I know there are myriads of details & problems involved in implementing ideas like these, but ANYTHING is better than letting Obamacare further bankrupt and damage our country.
That’s not my intention John…
I’m trying to REPLACE their thousand + pages of unconstitutional BS, with just as few simple, rational and legal ones.