Hijexx wrote:

Decius wrote:

Caleb Medley was shot in the eye at the Aurora movie theater mass shooting.

Like a number of people injured in the Aurora shooting, he is uninsured. His family has been told that the cost of his medical treatment may exceed $2 million.

The shooting is a tragedy. I know the correlation Xeni is making is a double edged sword. On the one hand it's bringing visibility to an aspect not many people would otherwise think of, mainly the financial aftermath. On the other hand, it feels like using the tragedy to grind a political axe.

There have been a bunch of discussions about gun control in the wake of the this shooting. If you genuinely believe that gun control would make a difference in cases like this, perhaps you are likely to feel that its a legitimate response - you're not grinding a political axe so much as you're pointing out a solution to a real problem.

The issue that I have with it is that I don't think gun control would make a difference when it comes to this kind of incident, so I think emotional appeals for gun control that reference the incident do lean in the direction of political football spiking.

Where this really becomes a problem is when the solution you're proposing has nothing to do with the problem but you're trying to take advantage of people's feelings about the problem anyway.

I don't think that accusation is fair with regard to the healthcare discussion.

All insurance is redistributive. We all put money in a pot and one of us gets to take that money because he or she got sick. The debate in the US over healthcare is about who is allowed to access the pot and how much their access should cost.

Opponents of national healthcare frequently make the argument that people get sick because they are irresponsible. They smoke. They drink. They don't eat healthy. They ski. Giving them free health insurance just enables them to be irresponsible with their behavior. Honest tax payers should not have to foot the bill for that - these people should be responsible for themselves.

The problem with this logic is that expensive health problems can strike at random. This is a perfect example. Caleb Medley was not shot in the face because he was being irresponsible.

Should Medley have access to care? This is a real world scenario. If one's views on the healthcare issue don't anticipate situations like this, they are wrong.

Should Medley have had insurance? Yes. He would have had access to care if he had insurance. However, anyone could have been in that theater that day. There is not a single human being in this country for whom that answer is no, so there should be no problem making insurance compulsory, just as education is compulsory, because the answer for everyone is always yes in every circumstance.

Even if we decide that Medley made a mistake by not having coverage, and he decides now to remedy that mistake, he cannot.

The problem is that an injury like this permanently bars you from the insurance market. Now that this incident has occurred, it will be impossible for Medley to ever purchase insurance on the open market at any price, even to cover medical issues totally unrelated to this preexisting condition.

What is Medley supposed to do now?

I think this case perfectly illustrates both the dysfunction of our approach to healthcare and the logical fallacies of the arguments that support that approach. In saying that I'm not trying to make an emotional appeal about the tragedy. I just think its a great example of a scenario that our system cannot handle.

Unless one thinks Medley should be denied care, and that he should die, and that is ok. There are tragedies like Medley's every day. If that is what supporters of our healthcare system think, then I believe that they ought to have the confidence of their convictions when faced with a real world situation. I don't think its reasonable to simultaneously hold the view that it is ok for people to die from treatable conditions because we are unwilling to pay for their care while ducking the issue whenever a real person actually dies because its too emotional. Thats cowardice.

(I also don't think its reasonable to carve out a nifty exception to the rules that handles Medley's specific circumstances. There are a wide variety of circumstances just like Medley's. Accidents happen. People get cancer from random particles from space. The problem of unpredictable medical issues needs a general solution.)

RE: Uninsured Aurora shooting victims face financial devastation - Boing Boing