It’s early in 2006, but this article most assuredly will qualify as the dumbest article written this year . . . or any year for that matter.

I can’t even attempt to summarize the author’s point, or the astoundingly inane and tortured logic he uses to support his point.  Just read it, and keep in mind that there is no such thing as "ventilator insurance".

UPDATE:  Ezra Klein read the same article, and writes what I didn’t have time to:

• There’s no such thing as ventilator insurance. There’s health insurance. Making up ventilator insurance with a cost of $75 is a cheap trick — I wouldn’t take that deal either, it’d be like buying knee replacement insurance, or sideswiped-by-Toyota-RAV4-on-rainy-night-beneath-crescent-moon insurance. On their own, most every health problem is too remote to justify individualized insurance, but taken in the aggregate, serious health problems asymptotically approach certainty as you age, and most everyone would like health insurance to protect against being pulled from their ventilator, or feeding tube, or antibiotics, before seeing their mother.

• Landsburg defines compassion as "sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it." He then says there’s nothing compassionate about giving his made up "ventilator insurance" to a 21-year-old who wants something else. Which has nothing at all to do with the relative compassion of ripping a 27-year-old terminal cancer patient from her ventilator before her mother can arrive to say goodbye. Also, you know what else isn’t compassionate? Setting up false choices.