Socialized Medicine Wouldn't Have Saved Nataline Sarkisyan

In today's Daily News, Geri Jenkins of the California Nurses Association takes a page from John Edwards, and uses the death of Nataline Sarkisyan to make the case for socialized medicine:

Every politician who thinks the solution to our health-care crisis is to mandate everyone purchase insurance products should stop and think about Nataline Sarkisyan. Her family was "covered" and "insured." And it didn't matter. They were denied care in the interest of Cigna profits. They deserved health care but got Cigna-care.

The California Senate, which will consider the Schwarzenegger-Nuñez bill later this month, has a variety of serious issues to consider, including the uncertain funding for the bill at a time when the state is facing a $14 billion deficit and the administration is already talking about cuts in current health programs.

Still it's important to know there is an alternative bill, one that has already passed the Senate, and will be considered in the Assembly in the coming months: Senate Bill 840, authored by state Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Los Angeles. It's similar to the system that exists in every other industrialized country and looks a lot like what we have with Medicare, only expanded and improved and covering everyone.

Under SB 840, doctors - not insurance companies - decide what medical treatment patients need. The profit motive to delay or deny is eliminated.

Isn't that the health-care system Nataline deserved and that all Californians should have?

Well, maybe, but it's not the health-care system SB 840 would deliver. Jenkins operates under the myth of the free lunch -- the erroneous belief that when a "single payer" (read every taxpayer in the state) is paying for health care, health care becomes unlimited, and every patient gets whatever treatment his or her doctor recommends.

But real-life socialized medicine doesn't work that way. Instead of insurance companies deciding who gets what care, government boards do it. (Indeed, when devising her national health plan, Hillary Clinton convened a whole panel of philosophers to discuss how best to ration medical treatment.) And in the place of the profit motive, we get the politics motive, the ideology motive, the special-interest motive, the inept bureaucracy motive, and the who-has-the-best-connections motive.

One can argue, I suppose, that this is an improvement over what we have now, but let's not pretend that scarcity, tough choices, and harsh denials would cease to exist under the socialized model. Far from it. In "every other industrialized country," there are also guidelines as to which treatments get covered, and which ones get denied, regardless of what the physician recommends. There are also often major shortages and long waits for basic medical treatment.

Horrific and tragic though the Nataline Sarkisyan story is, there's no guarantee that under a socialized system her liver transplant would have been approved. And even if it were, she likely wouldn't have survived the long wait for a surgeon.

When it comes to health care, there are no easy answers -- and there are always trade-offs.