Agism in the form of age-based health care allocation fosters the separation of
the physiological part of a patient from the person who is the patient. It does so
by ignoring the holistic best interests of the patient and instead focuses on providing
certain procedures or therapies only when the patient’s age is less than or
equal to a specified value (the allocation limit). Certainly not all forms of clinically
relevant care and treatment are age-restricted in the scheme of aged-based health
care allocation, but it is clear that this scheme functions on the arbitrary, and
patients may miss out on optimal therapy presumably because it will be ranked as
too expensive or too rare to provide to older people. Arbitrarily chosen age limits
or those chosen based upon an estimation of humans’ natural lifespan have
the effects of minimizing the patient’s clinical choices, devaluing the experiential
skills and knowledge of the medical team, weakening the doctor-patient relationship,
and commodifying medicine. Policies of this nature do not solve our current health
care dilemma, rather they are an economic bandage over the still present (and unattended
to) root cause.