Will Death Panels Practice Racial Preference?

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the architects of Obamacare, has revived the controversial issue of death panels by writing an article in The Atlantic announcing that he hopes to die at 75, and, while taking care to insist that is only his personal preference, he leaves no doubt that he thinks others should avoid old age as well.

One almost aside in Ezekiel’s article caught my attention. “Japan,” he writes, “has the third-highest life expectancy, at 84.4 years (behind Monaco and Macau),

 while the United States is a disappointing No. 42, at 79.5 years. But we should not care about catching up with—or measure ourselves against—Japan. Once a country has a life expectancy past 75 for both men and women, this measure should be ignored. (The one exception is increasing the life expectancy of some subgroups, such as black males, who have a life expectancy of just 72.1 years. That is dreadful, and should be a major focus of attention.)

Really? Exactly why should we do that, if it’s all down hill after 75 anyway? Or perhaps, because of the life expectancy differential between black and white males, the quality of life cutoff for black males should be lower than 75, which it already is.

And what about the life expectancy of those “subgroups” that is greater than 75? Should all efforts be stopped to increase their life expectancy even more? The Centers for Disease Control has reported that in 2010 the life expectancy of white females was 81.3, of black females was 78, and of white males was 76.5. Is it equally “dreadful” that the life expectancy of men of both races is lower than that of women? Should equalizing death by sex also be “a major focus of attention”? If death panels (by whatever name) are created, they will no doubt want to draw on Dr. Emanuel’s expertise in designing quality of life ceilings for different “subgroups.”

The CDC report linked above also noted that homicide was, after heart disease, the largest cause of the differential life expectancies between black and white males. NBC News, in fact, thought that the most newsworthy finding of the report, titling its article about it “Homicide ‘directly affecting’ racial gap in U.S. life expectancy, study shows,” and noted:

The majority of homicides involve youth and young adults between the ages of 10 and 24. In fact, it’s the number one cause of death among black males in this age group. And despite making up just 13 percent of the population, the FBI reports that half of the homicide victims in 2011 were black.

NBC quotes an emergency room physician:

We have to look at [violence and homicide] like a disease…. There are over 700,000 reported violent acts per year involving U.S. youth presenting to our hospitals. We have to stop looking at violence as a purely social problem.

When we in the medical community started looking at motor vehicle accident deaths and looked at the factors that contributed to death — speeding, low car safety standards, not wearing seatbelts, driving while intoxicated — changes were made to legislation to enforce driving with seatbelts, lower the speed limit, and encourage sober driving, and the number of MVA deaths decreased.

The same needs to happen with violence and homicide.

The Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics has reported that “[a]bout 93% of black homicide victims and 85% of white victims in single victim and single offender homicides were murdered by someone of their race.”

Perhaps black on black murder should be treated as a hate crime and given enhanced punishment.

 

 

 

 

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