Cutting human beings

Articles & Commentary: Arizona attempted to save money by curtailing expensive procedures that were believed to be relatively ineffective. From the standpoint of hard choices and cold calculation, this principle is defensible. But there is little reason to believe that Arizona undertook the time-consuming and painstaking data collection and cost-benefit analyses that should inform such policy change. Instead, it clumsily targeted a discrete group of people with names and faces who will die without a standard procedure that is proven to be successful in so many cases.