There and here
Thursday, September 25 2008
Kevin, MD thinks it’s just awful that a man died in a Canadian emergency room. Of the patient in question:
“If you approached him he would certainly talk to you, but rarely initiated, would not ask for anything. He was not a demanding person at all,” said Garth Reesor, the mission’s chief operating officer.
The man apparently never demanded treatment. Of course, that kind of thing almost never happens here; we demand treatment and still don’t get it. And when it does happen, it’s only at public hospitals; private hospitals are far too well-run to let homeless people stay in their ERs long enough to die.
More seriously – yes, a socialized system made a mistake and deprived a person of care. But in a market-driven system, some people must be deprived of care in the ordinary function of the system – it’s intrinsic to the organization of the market. Given the choice between a system that makes unfortunate mistakes and a system in which misfortune is built-in, I’ll take the former.
