Bloomberg.com: Cancer Patients Lose Chance of Longer Life as U.K. Curbs Costs
To all of you who are into nationalized healthcare, doesn’t this just mess up your mind? Turns out, the world of cost-benefit analysis and the reality of scarce goods/choices isn’t confined to the private sector.
(via josephweisenthal)
Well, there are 47 million people in America who also couldn’t get that drug, since they don’t have health insurance, and that seems a lot worse to me. In America, my chance of not getting life-saving cancer medication is 47 million times greater than if I were in the UK. Maybe it’s a little original position of me, but I’ll take those odds. Of course, people in America could just pay out-of-pocket for the drug, but people in Britain can, too. And under any of the current schemes being considered in the US, that would still be the case.
The fact is that insurance companies have been making cost-benefit analyses based on a desire for profit rather than a concern with the common good. That’s totally understandable, but it hasn’t worked out so well. The health care system in America is the result of a lot of individuals making individually-minded decisions. And what’s happened is that health care and health insurance is now so expensive that millions of Americans just don’t get health care at all. God fucking bless cost-benefit analyses if they make sure women can stay in the hospital after they give birth, or that kids get proper preventative care. And yeah, sometimes the result of those analyses is that a guy with cancer has to die a little sooner than he would otherwise. But hey, everybody fucking dies. Deal with it.
1 year ago
