Set no limits : a rebuttal to Daniel Callahan's proposal to limit health care for the elderly

This book was written by a group of concerned professors from various disciplines in response to Daniel Callahan's Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society . The book states that Callahan's ideas amount to "medical totalitarianism", inverting the Western Tradition concerning the value of life by making death sometimes good and life sometimes evil. According to the book, Callahan's views have in the past been adopted by the American Medical Association. This book represents the wisdom a diverse group of experts who sounded the alarm years ago against what would in the current debate be called death panels. PROLOGUE: The Indivisibility of Life / Nat Hentoff PART ONE: Moral and Ethical Aspects of Age-Based Rationing 1.) Mandatory, Universal Age-Based Rationing of Scarce Medical Resources / Robert L. Barry 2.) Life as an Evil; Death as a Good: Dualism and Callahan's Inversion / Robert P. George PART TWO: Legal and Jurisprudential Aspects of Age-Based Rationing 3.) When Bungling Practice Is Joined to Absurd Theory: Doctors Philosopher s, and the Right to Die / Hadley V. Arkes 4.) Target-The Elderly : A Nondiccrimination Perspective on Daniel Callahan's Setting Limits / Robert A. Destro PART THREE: Public Policy and Economic Aspects of Age-Based Rationing 5.) Rationing Health Care: Legal Issues and Alternatives to Age-Based Rationing / Marshall Kapp 6.) Efficient Allocation of Health Care to the Elderly / Lawrence DeBrock 7.) EPILOGUE: Will the Real Daniel Callahan Please Stand Up? / Robert L. Barry, Gerard V. Bradley In early 1987 the renowned medical ethicist Daniel Callahan argued in Setting Limits that radical measures were necessary to assure the future security of the American health care system. This book charges that rationing would be unjust and profoundly biased. Contributors criticize the proposal from legal, economic, philosophical, medical, and religious perspectives.