It's only fair

If you were 55 and needed a heart transplant, would you use your life savings of $800,000 to get it done or would you leave the money for your heirs? How about paying for your brother's transplant? Probably a slightly different answer. How about your neighbor's transplant? I'm guessing less than 1% of the population would.

Now if you had $800k, would you spend it on this guy's heart transplant...........

An Auburn man who is serving an 18-to-40-year state prison sentence for raping and sodomizing a 13-year-old female relative in 1996 is being evaluated for a possible heart transplant.

Mercy Flight flew Kenneth Pike, 55, from Coxsackie Correctional Facility to Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester last week, where 49 patients are awaiting heart transplants.

If doctors approve the procedure for Pike, he would be the first inmate in New York State to receive a heart transplant. It would cost taxpayers around $800,000, according to a report by the ABC television station in Rochester.

"He's doing his time, but he's still a human being. He still has rights," Pikes' sister Sharon Cardinal said in an interview with The New York Post. "He should be treated as much as any other person...And these people complaining about the taxpayers' cost -- well, we are taxpayers, too. We're paying for it."

Yeah, he still has "rights". He totally has the "right" to pay for his own damn transplant.

In a deeper context, this is why I detest government programs like this. It creates a whole new paradigm of fairness.

For instance, why should I pay "X" amount in taxes to support this derelict's heart transplant when I believe I have a better purpose for that money (frankly, injecting a kilo of heroin would be a better purpose than to fork it out to this guy).

Seriously, if you walked around your neighborhood and asked people to donate to this guy's predicament you probably wouldn't even get a lint ball for a donation and yet some nanny state says that this is "fair".

So I can understand why people want to cheat on their taxes. If they believe they have a more 'fair" purpose for their money, they're not going to be inclined to "donate" to a child molester's organ transplant.

In fact, this story makes me less inclined to donate an organ.

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