A Moral Outrage

The failures of socialized medicine keep multiplying. But when the New York Times starts publishing articles negative on government-run health care, you know that the pressure of the inherent contradictions and injustice of these abominable systems must be reaching a critical point.

In Great Britain, Debbie Hirst had contracted breast cancer. However, the National Health Service there denied coverage for the cutting edge treatment called Avastin. Not willing to give up, she decided to pay for the drug out of her own pocket. The cost; $120,000. But she was undaunted. According to the article:

So, with her oncologist’s support, she decided last year to try to pay the $120,000 cost herself, while continuing with the rest of her publicly financed treatment.
By December, she had raised $20,000 and was preparing to sell her house to raise more.

This, however, is not the end of the story:

But then the government, which had tacitly allowed such arrangements before, put its foot down. Mrs. Hirst heard the news from her doctor.
“He looked at me and said: ‘I’m so sorry, Debbie. I’ve had my wrists slapped from the people upstairs, and I can no longer offer you that service,’ ” Mrs. Hirst said in an interview.
“I said, ‘Where does that leave me?’ He said, ‘If you pay for Avastin, you’ll have to pay for everything’ ” — in other words, for all her cancer treatment, far more than she could afford.

Is your blood boiling yet? Well:

But in a final irony, Mrs. Hirst was told early this month that her cancer had spread and that her condition had deteriorated so much that she could have the Avastin after all — paid for by the health service. In other words, a system that forbade her to buy the medicine earlier was now saying that she was so sick she could have it at public expense.

Now, said Mrs. Hirst:

“It may be too bloody late
“I’m a person who left school at 15 and I’ve worked all my life and I’ve paid into the system, and I’m not going to live long enough to get my old-age pension from this government,” she added.
She also knows that the drug can have grave side effects. “I have campaigned for this drug, and if it goes wrong and kills me, c’est la vie,” she said. But, she said, speaking of the government, “If the drug doesn’t have a fair chance because the cancer has advanced so much, then they should be raked over the coals for it.”

If you think that there must be some morally compelling reason for the decisions of Britain’s NHS, think again. The bloody fingerprints of egalitarianism are all over this case:

Officials said that allowing Mrs. Hirst and others like her to pay for extra drugs to supplement government care would violate the philosophy of the health service by giving richer patients an unfair advantage over poorer ones.
Patients “cannot, in one episode of treatment, be treated on the N.H.S. and then allowed, as part of the same episode and the same treatment, to pay money for more drugs,” the health secretary, Alan Johnson, told Parliament.
“That way lies the end of the founding principles of the N.H.S.,” Mr. Johnson said.

In other words, a woman suffering from breast cancer and is able to pay her own way is to be sacrificed …literally…for no better reason than that someone else cannot do the same.

Ayn Rand identified the nature of this evil atrocity. She called it hatred of the good for being the good”.

The American advocates of socialized medicine (evasively called “universal health care”) call themselves compassionate. But this is the real nature, and the result, of the “compassion” of a system that first takes your money and in return places your vital health care decisions in the hands of egalitarian government bureaucrats.


This topic was brought to my attention by Noodlefood post of 02/22/08

For more on this topic, see:

Better To Be Equal Than Good

Hatred Of The Good

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