ABSTRACT
In order to reduce, minimize and eventually eradicate socio-economic differences between individuals, the egalitarian must create government systems that reconfigure the economy in terms of how income and wealth are distributed among the citizenry. Eugenics was a policy tool, essential to their political ideology, by means of which they believed they could exercise nationwide demographic planning. Under the eugenic policy principle of lebensunwertes leben the Nazis set out to clean the German population of individuals whose lives were considered a burden to society. In modern welfare states, eugenics is not race-based. Yet it is in health care that eugenic practices make themselves best known. Under guidelines from the National Board of Health and Welfare all health-care providers apply Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY) calculations when distributing rationed health care among patients. When welfare-state governments realize that they have to be systematic about rationing, their premise for doing so is not to put the patient above the health-care system.
