Justify your existence

I was watching the last part of Nightline tonight and heard them reference the Seattle dialysis scandal from the 1960s. Ted Koppel described it as a time when there far more patients in need of dialysis than there were machines to provide it, so people had to justify why they should get it instead of someone else. Then some kind of committee decided who lived and who died. What? I'd never heard of this before. It sounds absolutely horrid.

I can't find much about it online, but there's a short article about it here. Kidney dialysis was a new technology thanks to the invention of a new kind of shunt. There were only enough machines for about 1 in 4 to get it. A lay committee decided who got dialysis and who didn't. The citizens - a lawyer, minister, housewife, government official, labor leader, and surgeon - were a “life or death committee with no moral or ethical guidelines save their own individual consciences.” The Seattle Artificial Kidney Center selection committee made its decisions about who would be treated based on “social worth criteria,” giving preference to heads of households and those who contributed to the community as church members or scout leaders.

The scandal broke when a story about the Seattle committee was published in the Nov 9, 1962 issue of Life magazine.