Kennedy on Health Care

He gives a stirring speech...



But my problem is that promising people unlimited coverage -- everybody gets all the very latest, most expensive, unlimited health coverage -- is a lie. I'm all for universal health care, but it has to be reasonable. The cost must match benefits.

I remember being driven crazy in British Columbia back in the early 1970s when there was a family with a child with hydrocephaly, blindness, cerebral palsy, and mental retardation. He had undergone a number of brain operations. The prognosis was bleak, i.e. no improvement and just a long series of "more operations". So the parents said "enough, let him die". The child services of British Columbia stepped in and demanded that millions more be spent in operations on the kid. There was a big court case. I don't remember the outcome, but I was horrified. I kept thinking of how many kids could have thrived if they had gotten just a tiny bit of that money to solve a problem. But once it was given away, these other kids were being told "no". A health system that would go to court to force health care in a hopeless case when the money could be spent effectively elsewhere is completely irrational.

The amount of dollars in a system is limited. You have to be sensible. You can't gold plate everything. Ted Kennedy's speech implies gold plate, i.e. everybody gets the best possible health insurance!

That is a lie. That can't be afforded. Real health care systems with universal coverage make decisions about cost versus benefit (which is what the parents of that child did) and decide at some point "no more". It is better to spend the money to buy the best results. That can be dressed up as "death panels" but the reality is that homeless people quietly die in the streets of the US right now because they can't afford health care. Don't kid yourselves.

The most egregious case of people pretending to high moral judgements was the comparison between the Right to Life fanatics in the streets demanding that a brain dead woman in Florida, Terri Schiavo, be kept "alive" because "life is too precious". At the same time, a woman in Texas who was very much alive and conscious had run out of money and the hospital sued to "pull the plug" on her because she couldn't pay her bills. This is the case of Tirhas Habtegiris, an Eritrean immigrant with cancer and on life support. She wanted to live long enough to have her mother at her bedside. But the hospital sued and won to cut off the life support -- and let her strangle, fully conscious, strange to death -- because she couldn't pay. No "Right To Life" people were out in the streets of Texas protesting this. Nope.

Tirhas was dark skinned while Terri was white. I guess God loves the white skinned people more than the dark. At least that is the message I got from "Right To Life". And I also got the message -- loud and clear -- that the "Right To Life" people thought that having a brain dead person's life support being pulled was more "painful" than having a fully conscious person having the plug pulled and struggling for breath and dying fully aware that they were being "shut down" by a hospital that wanted payment. But I guess God also believes that if you can't afford your hospital fees, then it really isn't killing you to pull the plug and let you strangle while fully conscious.

God obviously believes -- and "Right To Life" certainly does -- that if you are white, middle class, and have insurance but are brain dead and don't know if you are plugged in or not, it would be cruel to unplug you even though you couldn't possibly notice because there is no you still alive in that brain dead body. Crazy!

What I find most obscene about the "health care debate" in the United States is the lying that both sides are doing. People need to know the truth. There are no "death panels" but there is no "unlimited health insurance". There is real costs in extending health care to everybody but there are real savings in removing a lot of the bureaucratic overhead of the insurance companies and the games they play to offload needy patients. There is need for an honest discussion. Groups that claim to "preciousness of life" need to be called out for their callous disregard for the poor dying daily in the US because they can't afford even simple, cost-effective health care. Those like Ted Kennedy who are selling gold plated dreams need to be called out because there will never be a system that gives everybody unlimited coverage.