In an op-ed in the Washington Times, Thomas Sowell argues, to put it crudely, that universal health care will kill people:
I saw what bureaucratic medical care meant in 1959, when I had a summer job at the U.S. Public Health Service headquarters in D.C.. Around 5 p.m. one day, a man had a heart attack on the street near our office.
He was taken to the nurse's room and asked if he was a federal employee. If he was, he could be sent to the large, modern medical facility there in the Public Health Service headquarters. But he was not a government employee, so an ambulance was summoned from a local hospital.
By the time this ambulance made its way through miles of downtown Washington rush-hour traffic, the man was dead. He died waiting for a doctor, in a building full of doctors. That is what bureaucracy means.
Now, it's a moot point whether you can really say that the American health care system is less bureaucratic than universal health care systems, but Sowell's example doesn't really illustrate the different priorities universal health care systems put on human life.
Now, to be sure, universal care systems use bureaucratic means to ration access to care, but they try to, and generally successfully do, ration on the basis of need and urgency. If a man had a heart attack outside a government hospital in a universal health care system it is almost certain that he would be bumped up the queue for treatment.
Indeed, it's precisely the fragmented, and non-universal nature, of the U.S. health care system that meant that this man died on the way to the other hospital.
Sowell's right, but not in the way, he illustrates. Sure, people suffer in universal health care systems because they are denied access to treatment, but it's not people collapsing on the street. It's people who have chronic conditions that appear not to be killing them, and who are waiting for their operations. People die in the American health care system too because they are denied treatment; by their insurer because their policy doesn't cover their condition, or because they don't have health insurance.
It's a much more complex moral and economic calculus which of these two ways to die slowly is worse than Sowell's column admits.
Posted by robe0419 at May 11, 2004 4:12 PM