Cass Sunstein
Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), Cass Sunstein, has advocated that laws be changed so that deceased patients’ organs may be harvested for transplant without prior consent from the patient or family.
Sunstein and co-author Richard H. Thaler outlined the policy in their 2008 book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Many organs that could be used in transplants are lost because patients fail to give their consent before dying, Sunstein and Thaler note, and family members often refuse to donate their loved one’s organs.
This “explicit consent” should be turned into a “presumed consent,” write Sunstein and Thaler, where laws would assume that, unless people explicitly choose not to, they want to donate their organs to science for transplant or other medical uses.
“Presumed consent preserves freedom of choice, but it is different from explicit consent because it shifts the default rule. Under this policy, all citizens would be presumed to be consenting donors, but they would have the opportunity to register their unwillingness to donate,” they explained.
Sunstein and Thaler go on to write that the political battle to reverse laws from “explicit consent” to “presumed consent” could be more easily accomplished through a system of “mandated choice.”
“Another [problem] is that it is a hard sell politically,” they write. “More than a few people object to the idea of ‘presuming’ anything when it comes to such a sensitive matter. For these reasons we think that the best choice architecture for organ donations is mandated choice.”
Mandated choice is a process where government forces you to make a decision – in this case, whether to opt out of being an organ donor to get something you need, such as a driver’s license.
“With mandated choice, renewal of your driver’s license would be accompanied by a requirement that you check a box stating your organ donation preferences,” the authors stated. “Your application would not be accepted unless you had checked one of the boxes.”
As Obama’s Regulation Czar, Sunstein will play a major role in defining the government’s role in controlling medical care. In 2003 he wrote a paper for the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies arguing that human life varies in value.
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Unconscionable – An absolute souless beast with no business being within ANY administration that affects Americans…..His 2003 paper arguing that human life varies in value reads like a plot in a low-budget horror flick….
The United States is a whole lot closer to presumed consent than most people know. Most people think you’re assumed not to be an organ donor unless you sign up to be one. That used to be true, but it’s not any more.
Under the 2006 Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, an organ procurement organization (OPO) can assume you are an organ donor while they search for evidence of your true intentions. They can hook you up to artificial life support machines to keep your organs fresh, even if your advance healthcare directive says you don’t want artificial life support. They can hassle your family for permission to harvest your organs. They can ask a government bureaucrat for permission if they can’t find your family. They can do this even if the “organ donor” box on your driver’s license is blank.
The 2006 UAGA has been enacted in 39 states and the District of Columbia. Over 80% of the U.S. population lives in states that have enacted this law.
The 2006 UAGA stacks the deck against people who don’t want to be organ donors. Unless your decision not to donate is documented in exactly the right way, OPOs can ignore your decision. State organ donor registries, which OPOs must search under the 2006 UAGA, are biased against non-donors. None of them, not a single one, will record your decision not to donate. They literally won’t take “no” for an answer.
DoNotTransplant.com operates the only online donor registry that allows you to say “no” to organ donation in a way that will stand up under the 2006 UAGA. OPOs are required under law to check this registry. If they find your name on it, they’re legally forbidden from harvesting your organs.
Cass Sunstein, commissar of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), was himself a recipient of an a brain from a wild hyena; this was necessary because he was born with a brain the size of a lentil which never matured in size or mental proficiency. He was taken to Doctor Moreau on his island in the South pacific who performed this organ transplant.
It is to be noted that the Hyena never volunteered to be an organ donor.
This is right out of the book, “1984” only Chairman Hussein uses euphemisms in naming his hierarchy of illegal departments of Commissars, The office of information and Regulatory Affairs = the Ministry of Medical Scavengers!
Matching lamp shades….??? Did I here someone in the back shout “The Nazi Third Reich?” If so, who could expect anything but misinformation from those Obama haters.
It is The Nazi Fourth Reich, not the Third, so get your facts straight, you right-wing Obama haters!
By the way, with the anticipated windfall of corpses from the Obama Death Panels, this guy got here just in time.