Letters to the Editor – July 30 – Herald-Mail Media

Columnist makes a leap comparing health care systems

I read with interest the column by Richard Kocur (July 26), wherein he makes a leap that Evel Knievel wouldnt attempt. The assumptions he makes indicting Britains public health systems (his dog-whistle term is socialized health care system) that he claims on several moral and ethical levels are suspect. He evidently uses the U.S. system as the benchmark for ethical and moral comparisons.

Kocur apparently believes that the American system that rations health care on ability to pay and has medical treatments rationed by insurance company actuarial decisions is somehow superior to a system where the medical profession and the courts make the ultimate decision. For every Charlie Gard anomaly in America, you can point to thousands of medical treatments that are denied by the insurance gatekeepers as experimental or medically unjustified.

Kocur says that a 2014 U.K. survey indicates that British physicians feel rationing has negatively affected their ability to effectively practice. Has he talked to his doctor lately?

Perhaps Kocur should look at the medical outcomes between the American system and the public health programs in other industrial countries. The Commonwealth Fund published a report in 2014 that listed the top 10 industrial countries health care programs the U.S. was 11th. A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine listed the U.S. as 37th in the world. Other countries spend less and get better outcomes.

To use an extraordinary case like Charlie Gard as a benchmark for the entire health care program is intellectually dishonest. If we keep justifying our extraordinarily expensive and questionably effective health care based upon cases that fall at the extreme of statistical analysis, we will continue to have a poor system.

Bob Ayrer, Falling Waters, W.Va.

Richard Kocur (July 26) presents a heart-wrenching and well-written argument in favor of better health care for all, using Charlie Gard as an example. What seems to be missed in all these arguments is the main problem: What makes health care so expensive? The answer is simple and painful: hubris.

Hubris (also hybris, from ancient Greek) describes a personality quality of extreme or foolish pride or dangerous overconfidence.

Any effort and any expense to save a life is the argument for endless research, testing, protocols and drugs. Sometimes it works. And often it simply produces lengthy misery.

Countries with national health plans now have several generations worth of information to indicate in most humane fashion when money should be spent. A little secret rarely mentioned: Medicare limits treatment after the age of 85 for many conditions.

Frightening reality: The Gards had the great misfortune to have a child with a lethal mutation. For those who might not be aware, mitochondria are the sites of energy production in every cell in your body. Nature has generally kept the gene pool strong and healthy by eliminating such mutations. The carriers simply do not live to reproduce. As painful as it is for the parents of the afflicted, it is also necessary for humanity as a whole.

Back to hubris. We humans think that we can and should control everything, that immortality should be achievable, all disease eliminated, cost no objective. Then dont complain about the economy falling apart because of health care costs. And dont believe that there is any system that can support such an attitude.

The end result will be as it is clearly developing: extensive care for the very wealthy and minimal to none for those in the lower echelons of the economic structure.

Amy Schmersal Paradise, Hagerstown

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Letters to the Editor - July 30 - Herald-Mail Media