Bakerstreet

How about a little story?

Bob lives in a modest cookie cutter house with his wife and two kids. Him and his wife work hard and have a good life together. The Bob family is in perfect health. Bob is in peak condition, he jogs ten miles to work and back every day. He eats healthy, works out and gets a physical every year. He eats meats, seafood and vegetables in moderate healthy portions, he only occasionally drinks wine and has never ever smoked. His body inside and out is prefect. His heart is strong and beats like a perfectly tuned engine, in fact, every organ in his body is in peak condition. his wife and kids are in similar condition

Frank is Bob’s next door neighbor, almost everything about Franks life is the same as Bob’s, he has a wife and two kids, lives in the same type of cookie cutter house, works for the same company, does about the same thing as Bob. The differences are mostly personal, Frank doesn’t jog to work, he takes his car when he does go in, but he mostly telecommutes. His body is in no where near the condition that Bob’s is. He is twice the weight he should be, he sits all day on his couch and works on his computer, all the while eating snacks and twinkies, his lunch is usually two large pizzas that he has delivered and dinner is whatever greasy fast food that his wife picks up on her way home from work. Frank smokes a pack of cigarettes a day and drinks heavily. His arteries are severely clogged, his liver resembles a little black rock and his lungs are black with cancerous growths.

Bob works hard to take care of himself and it shows, Frank doesn’t care and doesn’t even try.

Sadly Frank’s lungs and liver are failing, his heart is working harder then it needs to to pump blood around his large body. Frank is not going to last much longer. You see, Frank doesn’t need money, that won’t help him, Frank needs new lungs and a new liver. It’s wrong that poor Frank has no way to get the things that he needs to continue living, it’s criminal even. Then there is that horrible Bob guy, he has his perfect body while Frank wastes away. But this isn’t a sad story, don’t worry, it has a happy ending. You see in this world, there is government healthcare, Everyone gets cared for. So if Frank doesn’t have what he needs, that’s OK, you see, Bob has what Frank needs. So we’ll take a prefect lung from Bob, he does have two, and we’ll take half his perfect liver and we’ll give them to Frank.

Yay, now Frank can go back to eating his Yummy greasy burgers, and his ciggies and booze, and Bob, well he’s fine too, so what if he doesn’t have the lung capacity to jog to work anymore, that’s what cars are for! Hmm, Frank’s wife and kids are not looking good, maybe we need to get Bobs prefect little wife on the table…and when do his kids turn 18?

David Swensen comments that the government should examine their profiles and lifestyles before helping Frank, but there are no ‘death panels’ in this story, everyone is treated equally! Thanks for commenting David.