News / Brèves Back to previous selection / Retour à la sélection précédente Sir Bill Gates Explains His Genocidal Calculus 20 May 2013 In an interview with Ezra Klein of the Washington Post on Sunday, billionaire Bill Gates, one of the biggest sources of money for medical research in the world, gave a revealing answer to the question "how do you make these decisions about what is worth paying for?" Gates—who is reported to be fanatically committed to solving the "overpopulation" problem—jumped right into the Hitlerian "useless eater" calculus. "The way this is talked about is, ’What’s a year of life worth?’," he said. "They call it a disability-adjusted life year (DALY). When you’re running a poor country health-care system, you can’t treat a year of life as being worth more than, say, $200-300 or else you’ll bankrupt your health system immediately. So, with few exceptions, you do nothing for cancer.... "Even simple things don’t pass the test. We’re on the verge of saying that Africa should do blood pressure medicine because it’s become generic and so cheap and that’s such a common issue in terms of heart attack death." "But here’s the good news for these countries. If you spend the less than 2 percent of what the rich countries spend, but you spend it on vaccinations and antibiotics, you get over half of all that healthcare does to extend life....." Klein swallows this fascist tripe without a blink. Later he comes back to ask Gates to apply the logic to the U.S. health system. Gates says: "Unfortunately, in rich-world health, innovation is your friend and enemy. Innovation is inventing organ replacement, joint replacement. We’re inventing ways of doing new things that cost $300,000 and take people in their 70s and on average, give them an extra, say, two or three years of life. And then you have to say, given finite resources, should we fire two or three teachers to do this operation? And with chemotherapies, we’ve got things where we’ll spend our dollars on treatments where you’re valuing a life here at over $10 to $20 million ... which if you were infinitely rich, of course that would be fine. "So most innovations, unfortunately, increase the net costs of the healthcare system. There’s a few, particularly having to do with chronic diseases, that are an exception. If you could cure Alzheimer’s, if you could avoid diabetes—those are gigantic in terms of saving money. But the incentive regime doesn’t favor them." Klein answers: "A prerequisite for the kind of cost-cutting innovations you’re talking about is being willing to make judgments about what a human life is worth. But if you start trying to even get people to think about those choices, people cry ’death panels!’" "Yes, someone in the society has to deal with the reality that there are finite resources and we’re making trade-offs.... [W]hen you made it reimbursable for a doctor to ask, ’Do you want heroic care at the end-of-life,’ that was a death panel. No, it wasn’t a death panel! It was asking somebody to make a decision." Bill Gates received an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II in March 2005.