What is the life of a physically disabled child worth? It’s a cruel, but important question for the devoted people who work in pediatric rehabilitation as well as Treasury officials who want to cut costs and medical ethicists who think about what is morally right.
The annual financial cost of taking care of an Israeli child with cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy or other disabilities is around $50,000. The US Environmental Protection Agency calculated that the “statistical value” of a coal miner, calculated by how much the government would invest in preventing him from dying in a work accident, is $6.1 million. Governments are willing to spend $129,000 a year to keep a kidney-failure patient alive using dialysis to clean their blood.
According to Dr. Eliezer Be’eri, deputy director-general of Jerusalem’s Alyn Hospital, “taking care of a child in our pediatric rehabilitation hospital is worthwhile for society. But I can’t look at people as numbers. It’s easy to lose our humanity. Money is not the only thing to be considered. Our humanity is at risk. What are all our resources worth if we are not humane?”
“A brain-damaged child will not contribute to society, but I must take care of him because he’s a human being. I have to do it not because society might one day benefit from him. Even though economic benefits are important, expenses mustn’t determine if it’s ‘worthwhile’ to treat such a child. We look at their humanity, not their usefulness. It strengthens our own humanity.”
Be’eri was one of the speakers at Alyn’s First Conference on Pediatric Rehabilitation, which was held recently at Jerusalem’s Crowne Plaza Hotel and special workshop sessions at the hospital in the capital’s Kiryat Hayovel neighborhood.
The multidisciplinary medical institution, the only one of its kind in Israel and one of the few in the world, is directed by Dr. Maurit Beeri (no relation to Eliezer) and treats hundreds of children and teenagers as inpatients and outpatients. It has both regular rehabilitation and respiratory rehabilitation departments and a medical-educational rehab department for children as young as six months old. A rehabilitative day care center is available for infants and toddlers up to the age of three years, while kindergartens and a school serve children up to age...
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