Who Deserves Better Healthcare

Great question. The easy answer, of course, is to give it to the 20-year-old, since s/he has more years of productive life left, which can be extracted and sacrificed to our corporate overlords. But consider this: Perhaps the 75-year-old is a CEO, or sits on the board of a major company. In that case, he or she is probably capable of stoking capitalism’s engine room with hundreds or even thousands of lives.

So it’s not as simple as it appears. I also have to consider whether the 20-year-old might notice I’m carrying a ventilator and physically wrestle it from me before I can apply its life-giving grace to the shriveled husk of the 75-year-old Chevron board member who’s spent his/her life trading away the planet’s climate for profit. I mean, it’s unlikely, since this 20-year-old needs a ventilator. I can probably fight off someone who can’t breathe properly. But it would be truly humiliating if I failed, and had the ventilator ripped from my hands, under the watery, yellowing eyes of a corporate titan.

Of course, these are the kinds of tough decisions our brave front-line medical workers have to make all the time. Let me tell you, I don’t envy the doctor who has to decide whether a sick patient has enough economic potential to justify the patent-inflated cost of a life-saving medicine. That must be hell. But I suppose you don’t get into that field unless you’re willing to look a patient in the eye and judge their net worth.

Bottom-line, I just hope that one day we have technology to free us from this kind of heart-wrenching dilemma. I imagine a future in which patients can submit their economic potential statements over the internet, thereby saving them an expensive and time-consuming trip to a hospital in the event that the algorithm calculates they represent a negative cost-benefit healthcare scenario. I know what you’re thinking: “But Max, the time and financial hit to economically unproductive citizens is of no consequence. If anything, it’s mildly stimulating to the transport sector.” Still, I like to hope that one day things might be different. Not soon, obviously. Not if it will cost us anything. But let’s keep hoping.