Let the hard worker die of the heart disease and save the cost of the bypass surgery. Make this policy. That way, only people with appropriate occupations (with successful industries), inherited wealth, or government jobs will have health care, and the rest of us can hope we live in a neighborhood with access to cheap fresh food and sanitation services.

There's your "death panel". All it requires is that we be honest and forthright about what we do now, even though that means a lot of people in public relations will be out of work, and -heavens!- uninsured.

If people have the promise of help, even if it's not a kept promise, it keeps them hopeful and easy to manipulate. Come right out and deprive them, without all the flimflam of shifting blame, and we'll see how vested people are in social stability.

I read recently that Mozart is now suspected of having died from complications of strep, which is easily cured these days with a course of antibiotics, if you can afford them. Granted, antibiotics had not been discovered when he was ill, but considering the fact that he died broke, it's not unreasonable to believe he wouldn't have been able to afford them were he dying today. He would be merely an artist, a bagatelle, an aesthetic accessory to civilization, not a classification considered valuable economically, unless he had an agent who knew how to make him a rock star.

It's true that we have the potential of losing a lot of valuable human beings this way. But if we wish to continue to measure people by where they fall in a statistical study rather than by their intrinsic worth, we can well afford to lose those who merely live life in pursuit of meaning rather than money. I mean, so it's somebody's father, somebody's daughter, somebody's only friend. What difference could that possibly make?