Health Care Debate: Stephen Hawking Lives!

A quick update on the Stephen Hawking farce carried over from yesterday: when an opponent of health care reform wants to weigh in the discussion by using a reference to one of the world’s brightest people I think it wise that they check basic facts. Like where he was born and where he lives.

As you no doubt know by now the Investors Business Daily ran an editorial arguing against government run health care. It repeated and amplified the, by now common, right wing meme that government health care systems ‘ration’ money by, inter alia, refusing to treat difficult or long term illnesses. As an example it used the case of Stephen Hawking who suffers from crippling disease, is confined to a wheel chair, and who is now unable to talk without the aid of sophisticated machinery. The IBD said in its editorial that had poor Hawking been exposed to the British government run health care system [the ‘NHS’] he would have been refused treatment and thus the world would have been robbed of his enormous intellectual contribution.

Except of course Hawking is British and lives in Britain and uses the NHS.

Talking Points Memo caught up with him and asked his opinion. Which turns out to be quite supportive:

“I wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high quality treatment without which I would not have survived.” —Stephen Hawking, August 11, 2009

Not that this means the NHS is perfect. No system is. But it doesn’t deserve to be demonized either.

On a personal note: my father suffered from chronic kidney disease. He died very young – in his early 50’s – and his last years were made incomparably more comfortable by the NHS. The government installed, at no cost to our family, a dialysis machine in my parent’s home. They paid for all the plumbing and renovation necessary. I recall little or no bureaucratic hassle or resistance. The doctor controlled the entire decision. This was when dialysis was a new and very expensive technology – indeed it could be described as experimental at the time. Unfortunately the technology arrived too late to prolong my father’s life much – the damage was too pervasive.

This experience has made me a fervent supporter of government health care. Only those who have confronted the cost and bureaucracy of the American system in similar circumstances can understand the difference.

The issue is not about the quality of treatment or the professionalism of the doctors providing it. No. The issue is the cost and emotional burden at the heart of the American system. It is about removing the stress placed upon patients who have to understand and pay for complex and often lengthy processes that they are hopelessly equipped to comprehend; upon which they might depend for life; and for which they might have to bankrupt themselves and their families, right when they are most vulnerable.

No one would surely set out to construct a human system that places the greatest burden and stress at exactly the weakest point in a person’s life.

Except that what the American health care professionals have tolerated. Indeed they have defended it out of their own self-interest.

The NHS, for all its well known issues and its chronic under-funding, at least avoids that mistake. It is about health care. Not profit.