The inevitability of murder under government health care

At the age of eighty four, you have a heart attack.  The ambulance comes around, it stabilizes you, it takes you, free of charge to the free government hospital, and the free doctors at the free government hospital conclude you need open heart surgery, a stent and a coronary bypass.

Now the government can provide the free ambulance, and the free stabilization to everyone.  But there is no way it can provide the free stent and the free bypass to everyone, in part because free stuff always costs ten times as much as stuff that people pay for themselves (which is why free contraception is expected to cost $1000 per year).

The government could, and probably will, put you on the emergency waiting list to join the special emergency waiting list for open heart surgery, which waiting list will grow longer and longer until people dying on the waiting list balances supply and demand – but it cannot keep you occupying a hospital bed while you are on the waiting list, because if it does, it is rapidly going to run out of hospital beds.

So, one way or another, those hospital beds are going to be emptied.

One way around this is home care:  The government sends you out to die in your own bed, but has people come to your house to make sure that the bed gets changed, that you have a bath from time to time, and that there is food available.  This is expensive, but it is way cheaper than keeping you in a hospital bed to die, and a lot nicer for the patient to die in his own bed with his own family than to die in hospital so that the government can pretend it is treating him.  But the trouble is that this is apt to make it embarrassingly obvious that the government is sending you to your own bed to die, that the government cannot and will not provide all the medical care that everyone needs.  So to maintain the pretense that the government can provide all the medical care that everyone needs regardless of their ability to pay, it is going to clear those beds out by such measures as “deep sedation”.

Some governments have gone the home care path, and have avoided murdering people – but those are governments that unashamedly run a two tier system, where the middle class pay for their own health care in order to avoid the waiting lists and the death panels.  Governments that pretend to be running a one tier system, a system that supposedly guarantees unlimited health care for everyone, inevitably wind up committing murder.  They also wind up furtively running a two tier system, except that instead of everyone with money getting into the upper tier, only those with the right connections get into the upper tier.

The hypocrisy and murder that results from government healthcare inevitably corrupts the entire society.