In healthcare there are inevitable choices and every society must pick. For example, we must pick whether to:
1. Force people to pay taxes to create universal health insurance. In the US, we have universal health insurance for certain groups like all citizens over the age of 65 and for veterans.
2. Force healthcare providers to provide healthcare for free. America has done this by mandating that almost all hospital emergency rooms must provide lifesaving treatment to all people who show up regardless of their ability to pay. Hospitals pass on most of these uncompensated costs to the people who do pay and this is a major reason for the inflated hospital charges that the rest of us pay.
3. Force people to die if they don't have the money to pay for lifesaving treatments. The US has also chosen this for some of our patients who can't afford preventative care which means more expensive treatment in emergency rooms once their illness reaches the point where it is life-threatening.
At the "Tea Party" Republican Presidential debate, Ron Paul was essentially asked what he would pick and got applause for saying that freedom is all about all about individuals taking responsibility for themselves which means dying if you do not have insurance. Ron Paul said we should not force health insurance on people and he implied that we should not force hospitals to treat sick people who cannot pay and the audience cheered. The only option left is to let sick people die. The moderator followed up by pointedly asking him to spell out the logical consequence of rejecting the first two options of the moral triad. The only other result is if society should just let people die. You can hear in the video a chilling point when some of the audience yelled, 'Yea', but Ron Paul rejected that option too and instead he suggested that private charity could take care of the problem. But Ron Paul is naïve to think that charity is a plausible solution. Charity is insufficient to cover the uninsured already and Ron Paul advocates eliminating Medicare and Medicaid which would make the burden on charity care even more difficult. Even if the US diverted all our charitable donations to healthcare, charity still would not be nearly enough to fund healthcare for the uninsured, much less Medicare's spending on the elderly and disabled. Ironically, it turns out that Ron Paul's former campaign manager died of pneumonia without health insurance leaving a $400,000 hospital bill unpaid and his family solicited charitable donations to pay the bill, but the only mention on the web indicates that they did not get very much money donated. Ron Paul had just raised over $34million from donors for his campaign, but didn't provide his campaign staff with health insurance and his campaign manager was much less successful at getting donations to help with his health care bills.
