The Undeniable Logic of Government

I give up. I have to confess to my conservative friends that they were right; I was wrong, and I have seen the light. Government is not the answer. It is the problem and capable of such remarkable stupidity that were I to pitch the following true scenario to Comedy Central, they’d laugh me out of the writers’ room.

We will all agree, left and right, liberal and conservative, that we have a health care problem. All of us local folks know that King Drew Hospital was a disaster with people stacked up in the hallways, lying on the floors and dying in the parking lot. Part of the reason was almost certainly the culture of the hospital, but some of the pain, suffering and death was caused by the amount of traffic. There were just too many people to be served efficiently or even decently.

Many poor people, often without private health care providers or insurance, used the hospital and its ER for everyday health care. This made the problem of triage, of serving the most critical folks in order of need, especially challenging. The hospital was failing.

So what was our local government’s answer to overcrowding and having people waiting for five hours to see a doctor? Well, you know the answer. It was to close the ER. A brilliant strategy. To paraphrase the famous mantra from Field of Dreams, “If you close it, they won’t come.” It follows logically as day the night that if they don’t come, then no lines. Therefore, if no lines, then no one dies in a closed waiting room.

This has been so successful with King Drew that their mortality rate has fallen to, well, zero. Buoyed by their success, the Feds are back into it again. They have just served notice to UCLA Harbor that their wait times are also unacceptably long and are threatening (Yes, you guessed right. Believe it or not!) to pull their accreditation and close them up, just like King Drew.

The logic is impeccable. The answer to overcrowding and long wait times is to close the hospitals. This also cuts down on mal practice and medical error. After all, if you don’t give them any treatment, they won’t get any mal treatment. If you don’t see them, they won’t be misdiagnosed. If they are not mistreated or misdiagnosed they won’t sue. We are saving lives and money all at the same time. We could end our medical care crisis in a minute if we just eliminated doctors and hospitals and didn’t see sick people.

Who comes up with this cruel, stupidly conceived and ill-considered absurdity? The answer, I fear, is government both local and federal. Not willing to leave bad enough alone, yesterday our local geniuses issued a plan to close our public health clinics. They hope that by closing publically run clinics they can get the non-profit private medical providers to step in. They believe the private sector will be happy to do it cheaper. They can hope. The private sector is already not thrilled with how Medicare, Medical and other government agencies pay. I’m sure they’ll be eager to assume a larger part.

However, what is certain is that by closing the clinics they will drive more poor and underserved to the ERs for ordinary health care. This will increase the wait times to see doctors, increase the financial losses of the ERs, drive more of the private providers out and increase the number of poor who die in waiting rooms, on floors and in parking lots. It’s brilliant. It is our government at work.

My problem in swearing off government being the answer is that if public agencies can’t help and the private sector won’t, I guess the poor will just have to go somewhere out of sight and die.