According to this post by Warner Todd Huston the late Eric de la Cruz was too old for a heart transplant. Too old according to the Medicaid regulations set by the state of Nevada. Regulations that restrict coverage of heart transplants to people 20 years of age or younger. Eric died when he was 31.
People are already being denied medical treatment because of their age, and not just the elderly. There are panels already at work in the various states denying medical treatment to people seriously, chronically, sometimes fatally ill because those people don’t qualify under some rule or another. Denied medical care because certain people place adherence to a rule or regulation over human lives.
In Tilting at Mass Hysteria Goy of A Goy and His Blog has a number of things to say about universal health care coverage. He says, and I very much agree with him, that the problem is with our insistence on having our every selfish desire satisfied. We think we have the right to not be bothered with icky little details like having to pay ourselves for our medical treatment. So we impose a middle man between us and our doctor, and we pay extra for the privilege, though that payment is an invisible one because we don’t have to take cash out of our own wallets.
As Goy points out, it is not a problem with health care, it’s a problem with health care insurance. We willingly blind ourselves to how much having insurance pay for our treatments and doctor visitis costs us, and delude ourselves so far as to believe we’re getting treated for free. All the while we place our lives, sometimes quite literally, in the hands of people who don’t know us, and who need to follow regulations established for their benefit and not ours.
Eric de la Cruz died because he broke the rules. He died because bureaucracies can’t see past their ordinances and regulations. Public or Private it does not matter, no bureaucracy can see past those all mighty rules, and human need does not matter.
I will post further on this matter, just let me end this post with this thought,;universal health care insurance coverage will not make things better, it will only make things worse.
