Death Math

Headed for the Ditch - Bottle Rockets (mp3)
My Spirit Lives in Shadows - Rykarda Parasol (mp3)

The first time I grasped the depressing ramifications of life being worth a fixed dollar amount was watching Fight Club. Edward Norton's character in that film is a "risk assessor" whose job it is to survey accidents involving his company's cars and assess whether the potential lives lost cost more or less than the money required to fix a known problem.

I distinctly remember, three years or so later, reading about the controversy involving the victims of 9/11. Those charged with distributing funds had dared to place higher value on the lives of those whose lives were more lucrative, more revenue-generating. Why should the Wall Street investor's family receive millions when the janitor's family gets something in the small six figures? Death is death, and life is life, right?

In the present-day, some in the conservative corner are using the words "death panel." They're using it to suggest that the government has a maniacal plan to choose who lives and who dies, quite literally. A star chamber of sorts that would determine whether Grammy really needs that hip replacement or Grampy his fifth triple-bypass.

At some point between 1999 and 2009, I stopped being so bothered by human life having a price tag.

Maybe it was after my father demanded a DNR (do not resuscitate) arrangement.

His liver and his stomach and his entire body had lost so much as he fought cancer, and his brain was gradually giving way as well. And you could tell it aggravated the shit out of him, being incapable of expressing what he was thinking, sometimes being incapable of making sense of his own thoughts. At some point toward the end, I swallowed a very difficult belief: My father's life wasn't worth half of what it used to be, before he got so sick. My father's life had become more trouble than it was worth. Living, for him, had lost its economic balance.

The recent "death panel" demagoguery is intended to scare you with the image of some Janet Reno type and two of her pals sitting up in the emperor's box, giving their Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down signal to determine the fate of your loved one. It's a fictional image. Complete horse puckey.

Meanwhile, the Edward Norton job is fiction based on complete reality. People actually have jobs where they determine where traffic lights should go, what defects to recall, lots of scary and morbid and life v. death shit. Insurance companies have employees who act, basically, as "death panels of one." And it's very real. And their priority is certainly less about your sick grandmother than their company's profit margin. You don't believe it, start researching all the dire medical cases insurance companies have kicked to the curb with nary a blink (but you can start with a general link).

Or read this dialogue between Greta and Karl on FOXNews:

VAN SUSTEREN: But isn't that being done now? When you -- when you go to get a procedure or something, gets rejected by the insurance company -- I mean, isn't it, you know, unfortunately, sometimes your doctor can't make the decisions, but the insurance company, some non-medical person is?

ROVE: Sure, but you have an -- you have an ability to appeal that, and you have the ultimate ability to say, All right, you know what? I don't like my current carrier. I'd like to get a different insurance, which particularly in small businesses and when a small business owner's unhappy, he can shift his insurance.

Yes, after you have died because your insurance deep-sixed your claim, your former boss can change companies. But if you come down with a serious and deadly illness, I friggin' dare you to try and cavalierly switch insurance companies. Good luck finding one that will take you. Rove's argument is, literally and much like his heart, very cold comfort.

One way or another, people are out there putting a dollar amount to your life, to your arm, to your tongue, to your left cerebral hemisphere, to your pinky toe. This isn't a scare tactic. It's reality. Your life has a price tag whether you like it or not. The only real question here is who you find least trustworthy with a calculator in their hand and your life on the line.