Opposition's rebuttals to the Proposition's rebuttals

[Rebuttal to Rebuttal] On our policy, which is basically maintaining the status quo, the Proposition argues that this is a utilitarian policy in the sense that it leaves some people out. However, the Proposition made an assumption, which was that “Doctors have a right to deny referring to these criteria to save valuable transplants for other patients and to save money, because operations to other patients will be cheaper.” Now, is the Proposition justifying the trade-off between cost and human life? This is something that simply cannot happen in modern society, especially when doctors don’t have the right to make a choice in the first place, as the Opposition has been continuously arguing. On our reference to the Hippocratic Oath, the Proposition said that this is merely removing the burden of hard decisions to the government. However, the problem is that we are talking about human lives here. As the Proposition so kindly pointed out, a few months can be the difference between life and death for some of these patients. Taking into account the bureaucratic system of today’s government, there is little doubt that this shift of burdens will come at the cost of quite a few human lives. Because the Opposition values human lives above anything else, we cannot tolerate the denial of certain patients over others. Now, the Proposition seems to believe that in the example of the old man and the young sports player, the old man should be negated in the doctors’ waiting list because alcoholics are not going to be fully healed anyways. However, who says so? The fact of the matter is, 85% of alcoholics that receive liver transplants survive and live for an extended period of time. This number is only slightly less than the survival rate of normal patients; in other words, alcohol problems cannot be a justification for the discrimination between patients. Also, the Proposition committed the logical error of assuming that alcohol addiction is the dominant cause of liver disease, which is not true at all. Besides alcohol, so many other factors, ranging from consumption of fatty foods to smoking, contribute to liver disease. What are the standards that are to be applied to these people? The Proposition has not made this clear at all, which means that even if this policy is to be applied it would only bring about confusion. The final rebuttal was centered on how individual mistakes made over a course of time are worse than one-time mistakes. However, we are talking lives here. The Proposition must have all the time in this world to be considering the socio-economic background and the past psyche of the patients before deciding on whether they would allow doctors to perform liver transplants. We as the Opposition value human lives above the question of whether a transplant is valid or not, especially when it has been proven that alcohol is not the sole factor of liver disease, nor is it a much more detrimental factor than other factors. In all, the Proposition argues for what they think is human lives, but what actually is the validity of liver transplants. On the other hand, the Opposition is the one that is being realistic and effective at the same time in the sense that it is sticking to the status quo, which saves more lives than the proposed policy of the Proposition.