Imagine it's the end of the world.

There's a flu pandemic. Or The Plague. Or the sun is burning a hole in the atmosphere and we all have to be herded into caves. There's mass panic and people need medical treatment.

Imagine having to decide who is worth saving and who isn't. That was the task of an "influential group of physicians" who drew up a "grim" list of patients who simply wouldn't be treated, according to this story.

The idea is to try to make sure that scarce resources--including ventilators, medicine and doctors and nurses--are used in a uniform, objective way, task force members said.

As terrible as it sounds, I agree that there should be protocol in mass healthcare disasters. I don't want to be the one making the protocol, but I agree that for the sake of survival, someone or some group needs to make some tough decisions. I know, I know...there are serious ethical problems with making "a list" of people who get to live. Let's not go there right now.

While much of the list of those who would be left behind does not seem arbitrary--those with severe trauma, severely burned patients older than 60, those with severe mental impairment--I was struck by one category: those with a severe chronic disease, such as advanced heart failure, lung disease or poorly controlled diabetes.

Who's to say what exactly consitutes "poorly controlled"? There are different philosophies on what our target blood sugar ranges should be, the benefits of certain drugs and how aggressively we should be treated. So how could we possibly come to a consensus on what this means?

• Anyone with an A1C over, say, 7 should be considered poorly controlled?
• Anyone experiencing any kind of complications?
• Anyone who doesn't check their blood sugar more than, say, three times a day?

I have had several A1Cs over 7--some were my fault, some were the fault of the medicines I was taking and seasonal allergies. Am I going to be faulted because of pollen? Several of my A1Cs were over 7, but were on the way down. Again, would I have been considered "poorly controlled" even though my numbers were clearly getting better? We simply can't control every facet of what our bodies do and what we respond to.