Doctors and patients already do decide whether saving a life is worth the cost. This is a non-issue.

A lot of people are freaking out about downvoting this post because it doesn't match their narrative. **This is not political.**<br><br>I've seen a huge amount of posts recently saying that the US is going to let old people die because the president said that the cost of saving a life might be too high.<br><br>The first thing I think of here is organ transplants. In the US, organ transplants are not done solely on a first-come, first-served basis. The first thing that they look at is whether the person getting the organ transplant will survive with their new organ. If the answer is "no," then the person will be taken off the organ wait list. Why? Because organ transplants are expensive, not only in terms of money, but in terms of the organ itself. The donor's organ is being harvested for someone else to use, and if the recipient is unlikely to survive, then that organ is being wasted.<br><br>So the cost isn't money - it's the organ itself - and the cost of not having that organ available for someone who will survive is the cost of a human life. **And yet, doctors and patients alike have decided that saving the person who is not likely to survive is not worth the cost** of the organ, which could go to someone else who is much more likely to survive and live a happy life.<br><br>This is not an uncommon thing in medicine. Any time we are doing triage, we are doing exactly the same thing. When we have ten car accident victims, and two of them are dead, and four of them can wait, and four of them are critical, we focus on the critical patients first, and we focus on the ones who we can save before we focus on the ones we can't. We focus on the ones who we can save with the least amount of effort and resources before we focus on the ones who we can save with more, and we focus on the ones who are stable and doing well before we focus on the ones who we can't save at all.<br><br>**And every time we make one of these decisions, we are deciding that the life of one patient is worth more than the lives of other patients.**<br><br>In the US, we don't pay for healthcare with money - we pay for it with insurance. And a lot of people don't have good insurance, or they have no insurance at all. So when we have ten car accident victims, and two of them are dead, and four of them can wait, and four of them are critical, we focus on the critical patients first, and we focus on the ones who we can save before we focus on the ones we can't. We focus on the ones who we can save with the least amount of effort and resources before we focus on the ones who we can save with more, and we focus on the ones who are stable and doing well before we focus on the ones who we can't save at all.<br><br>This is the same decision that the president made, and it's the same decision that we make every time we do triage, or we do an organ transplant. **We are making a value judgment - we are saying that one life is worth more than another.**<br><br>I've seen a lot of people saying that the US is going to let people die because the president said that the cost of saving a life might be too high. I think there are good arguments to be made that the president's wording was poorly chosen. **But he did not say that US citizens are worthless. He said that the cost of saving a life is a factor in the decision.**<br><br>This is not a new thing. This is not a political thing. It is a human thing. And **if people are upset about it, they should be upset that we as a society are doing triage at all, not that the president said it out loud.**<br><br>***EDIT: As a side note, I think this is a good place to plug universal healthcare. It gets rid of a lot of the money argument. But it doesn't get rid of the argument entirely. Because just like we need to harvest donor organs from living donors, we need to harvest organs from cadavers. And just like we can't do organ transplants without harvesting organs, we can't have a functioning society without people being willing to work. And if people aren't willing to work, then we don't have the resources to pay for universal healthcare.***<br><br>***EDIT: To address the people in this sub who are downvoting this post without a comment, saying that I am the one who is off-topic, I would like to point out that this sub is called r/UnpopularOpinion, and that this post is an unpopular opinion. It doesn't have to match your narrative to be relevant.***