Nicholas Kristof published two articles lately. The first detailed the life, arguably bad decisions, and far worse results of a college friend of his. Long story short, the friend quit a lucrative job, decided he couldn’t afford private health insurance, was scraping by, delayed checking on some funny symptoms because of the cost of a doctor’s visit and wishful thinking … and ended up with prostate cancer that had metastasized into his bones.
Kristof used it as an example of our broken insurance system, something that can take some mistakes and leave you to die for them.
The second article, five days later, noted that the friend had died. Kristof then went over some of the reactions he got from some folks to the first article.
“Your friend made a foolish choice, and actions have consequences,” one reader said in a Twitter message.
[…] “Not sure why I’m to feel guilty about your friend’s problem,” Terry from Oregon wrote on my blog. “I take care of myself and mine, and I am not responsible for anyone else.”
Bruce wrote that many people in hospitals are there because of their own poor choices: “Smoking, obesity, drugs, alcohol, noncompliance with medical advice. Extreme age and debility, patients so sick, old, demented, weak, that if families had to pay one-tenth the cost of keeping the poor souls alive, they would instantly see that it was money wasted.”
That last item in particular — but even all the rest — put all the GOP talk over the last five years about “Death Panels” to shame. Even if you leave off the euthanistic enthusiasm of Bruce, you’re left with a set of criteria for who get to live, who gets to die. Nobody was seriously proposing (Republican rhetoric aside) a system of deciding who was somehow worthy of treatment due to their utility to the State. But here are people suggesting who is worthy of treatment based on guilt, on stupidity or irresponsibility, or (even better) to consanguinity. Republicans said that bureaucrats wanted the power of life or death — but, private-sector-wise, that’s what they have in the insurance industry. And these writers seem to want it themselves as well. If you are deemed too foolish, or too irresponsible, or if you’re not related to me, then you are not worthy of assistance to live.
That harsh view is gaining ground, particularly on the right. Pew Research Center polling has found that the proportion of Republicans who agree that “it is the responsibility of the government to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves” has slipped from 58 percent in 2007 to just 40 percent today.
What percentage of Republicans claim to be Christians again?
Kristof puts it a little differently:
First, a civilized society compensates for the human propensity to screw up. That’s why we have single-payer firefighters and police officers. That’s why we require seat belts. When someone who has been speeding gets in a car accident, the 911 operator doesn’t sneer: “You were irresponsible, so figure out your own way to the hospital” — and hang up.
To err is human, but so is to forgive. Living in a community means being interconnected in myriad ways — including by empathy. To feel undiminished by the deaths of those around us isn’t heroic Ayn Rand individualism. It’s sociopathic. Compassion isn’t a sign of weakness, but of civilization.
Except, of course, if you don’t punish the guilty — even the now-helpless and penitent guilty — then you create a “moral hazard.” Someone might think they can get away with working less than you, with being less morally worthy than you, and not suffer the just and righteous consequences of their slackerdom. Better that all such should die, even if a few maybe-not-quite-so-deserving fall through the cracks, too. Kill ’em all, and let God sort ’em out. I mean, it’s not any of us are required to forgive others their sins or debts or trespasses or anything …
I have to wonder, though, how many of those writers would actually act any differently if Kristof’s friend hadn’t made those mistakes — if he’d simply lost his insurance for one reason or another, hadn’t been able to afford regular doctor’s visits, and fallen mortally ill again. Would they have made up some new reason to judge him guilty, some other moral failing or weakness to cause him to deserve death? Would they assume that if he found himself in such straits, well, obviously God was punishing him for some sort of sin, and who were they to say otherwise? Would they not even make a pretense of moral justice and simply continue to proclaim a tribalistic “me and mine vs. everyone else”?
Ultimately, Kristof notes, it comes down to a societal choice — one that puts lie to the whole “Culture / Sanctity of Life” rhetoric that comes from the GOP and the Right:
In other countries, I’ve covered massacres, wars, famines and genocides, and they’re heart-rending because they’re so unnecessary and arbitrary. Those massacred in the Darfur genocide in Sudan might be alive if they had been born in Britain.
That’s how I feel about Scott. His death was also unnecessary and might not have occurred if he had lived in Britain or Canada or any other modern country where universal health care is standard and life expectancy is longer.
As long as, as a nation, we in the United States decide that help is only to be made available those the majority (or, in the Senate, the super-minority) decide are morally worthy of being helped, and as long as we let that and our “Don’t Tread on Me”ism and “I got mine, you go pound sand”ism and “Makers Not Takers”ism act as de facto but very real Death Panels … then I think we’ll be incurring a much great moral hazard than the possibility that someone “undeserving” might game the system and not pay the ultimate price for it.
Republican Jesus is a maker not a taker. He is not his brothers keeper because, you know, only child. He only helps those that help themselves…since if they help themselves he doesn’t need to help them. He likes to remind you that we will always have the poor, so why bother helping the moocher parasites? He is his own death panel. If you want to be rich, pray for it, you moocher loser.