Health Care Rationing: Do the poor deserve medical care?

From the New York times (Business Section!)

Do the poor deserve life support?” asks the economist Steven E.Landsburg in an article published under that title in Slate this month (www.slate.com/id/2133518/?nav=fo).The subtitle says: “A woman who couldn’t pay her bills is unpluggedfrom her ventilator and dies. Is this wrong?” Mr. Landsburg invokes”economic considerations” to suggest that the answer is “no.”

Manycommentators have attacked his argument as morally preposterous. Well,yes. But it is also economically preposterous. The two judgments arerelated. But before an attempt at explaining why, here are some detailsof the case, from the Slate article and the Dallas-Fort Worthtelevision station WFAA:

The patient  was Tirhas Habtegiris, a 27-year-old legal immigrant being kept alive by a ventilator as she lay dying of cancerlast month in the Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Tex.Physicians offered no prospect for her recovery. She was hoping,however, to hang on until her East African mother could reach herbedside.

Ms. Habtegiris had little money and no health insurance.On Dec. 1, hospital authorities notified her brother that unlessanother hospital could be found to treat his sister, Baylor would beforced to discontinue care after 10 days. But even with Baylor’sassistance, the family was unable to find a willing hospital. True toits word, Baylor disconnected her ventilator on Dec. 12, invoking a lawsigned in 1999 by George W. Bush, then governor of Texas. The law relieved doctors of an obligation toprovide life-sustaining treatment 10 days after having provided formalnotice that such treatment was found to be medically “inappropriate.”

Read the rest.  And then ponder whether we in the US really do have “the best heatlh care system in the world.”