Cutting Medical Costs of Death to Provide More Care for Living

In reply to “We Must Cut the Cost of Death to Provide Health Care for the Living” (Op-Ed Page, Dec. 5) by Neil Schram, who is later identified as “an internist at a health maintenance organization in Los Angeles,” I offer the following:

As an internist in the solo practice of medicine for nearly 25 years, I found very little with which I could agree in Schram’s comments. I find Schram’s opinions appallingly representative of a segment of the thinking of organized medicine and perhaps society, but I doubt that it represents the majority opinion.

First, Schram’s proposal takes the decision about dying out of the hands of patients, their relatives and their physician. This is totally wrong morally and ethically.

Second, Schram asserts that “the primary bar to solving these problems is money.” Among the problems, which he claims that more money would solve, he includes “curable sexually transmitted diseases.” I wonder what those are? AIDS is incurable, syphilis if not treated promptly is incurable, herpes, probably the most common venereal disease, is incurable. It is clear to me that the primary bar to solving these problems is not money and the amount of money available may have little to do with their solution. The primary bar to their solution is the moral philosophy of society.

A corollary to this fundamental problem is that the current attitude toward death, which Schram decries, is a direct product of this morally corrupt philosophy. Since there is no God in the humanist’s perspective there is no life after death and, therefore, life is to be clung to at all costs.

No, we must not follow the siren song and ask for government to do for us what we will not do for ourselves! Laws to force and compel will not solve any problems and neither, I believe, will making more money available.

COLLIN E. COOPER, M.D.

La Canada