Corrupted Culture

Douglas Schmidt of Oregon died on November 19, 2003. He was just 37 years old and he died after being taken off a ventilator that had kept him alive for eight months. Why was his death significant? For most, it won't be - but it should matter because of the reason he was on the ventilator to begin with: Douglas Schmidt suffered a massive seizure on March 1, 2003, rendering him unconscious and severely brain-damaged. His seizure only occurred because his state-paid medication for epilepsy ran out.

The Oregonian reports:

He became a local and national "poster child" for the human fallout of budget cutbacks in public services. Just last month, in a speech on national health care reform, former Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber cited Schmidt as "a tragic case in point" of why government cannot save money by cutting health care for the poor. ... Schmidt's seizure came a month after he and thousands of other Oregonians lost their prescription-drug benefit because of state budget cuts. In Schmidt's case, the state stopped paying for two drugs, including Lamictal, an antiseizure medication that costs $13 a day.

He ran out of pills eight to 10 days before his seizure, his family said. His hospital bill for the first five weeks ran 64 pages and totaled $272,364 -- about $7,200 a day. That does not count doctor fees. His care in the convalescent homes costs about $7,000 a month, not including several much more expensive hospitalizations. The total bill is likely in the $1 million range, his family said. How Schmidt's medical costs will be paid is not clear, but taxpayers will foot the bill in one form or another.

Society didn't consider it important enough to provide him with the minimal medical care he needed in order to survive, and so he didn't survive. There's really no difference between this and letting people starve to death or freeze to death in the streets - medication for many is no less a necessity than food and shelter.

Mark at Minute Particulars comments on the financial dimension of the reporting:

On the one hand, it's outrageous that his daily medication was not available. On the other hand, it's outrageous that we point out that a person could have cost us $13 a day rather than $7,200. A good indication of what society considers important can be glimpsed in the rhetoric that intelligent, well-intentioned people use to make their point. So, I guess I'm wondering why using economical or utilitarian notions, e.g. "for just $13 a day we can avoid paying thousands of dollars later on," seems to be more effective than something like "justice requires that every person have adequate healthcare."

I agree with his general point that the human cost, not the financial cost, should be our primary consideration here. The fact that a man died for want of basic (and should we say, affordable?) medication is the key issue - not the exactly dollar amounts that his care before and after the seizure cost.

On the other hand, pointing out those dollar amounts serves an important function - not because money "is a great motivator," but because money was the original motivator behind this tragedy. Saving money was the reason that his medication was cut off in the first place; therefore, the fact that money was not saved should be noted for the record. This is important because it shows that the decision to risk lives in order to save money was not simply immoral, but it wasn't even effective because it failed to achieve the ostensible goal of saving money.

This means that defenders of cuts in medical care don't even have that argument to use in defense of their actions. It's not a matter of giving them a money-motivation to stop cutting, it's a matter of taking away their money-motivation to continue cutting. At least, that's my perspective on being clear about what the actual dollar costs of such things are.

Mark references Pope John Paul II's 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus as a commentary on the corrupting influence from conceiving human beings solely from the perspective of economics, but I'm not sure that that encyclical should be relied upon too heavily. Michael L. Budde, Robert W. Brimlow complain about this encyclical in their book Christianity Incorporated: How Big Business Is Buying the Church:

What the pope describes and justifies...throughout Centesimus is a chaplaincy church. In John Paul's view, the function of the church's social teaching is twofold: first, not to responsibly confront concrete problems in all their aspects (presumably because there are other social institutions more expert), but to provide an ideal orientation for these practical practitioners; and second, to try to moderate what he believes are "excessive" outcomes of corrupt institutions and practices. Thus John Paul simultaneously accepts and justifies those institutions and practices - at least in an abstract general sense - as normative, as the way economics, for example, ought to be, and then complains because the results of economics-as-it-outght-to-be are anti-Christian, unjust, and oppressive. ...[T]he church described by John Paul sees itself as subordinated to the social reality of democratic politics and market economics. By accepting that subordination willingly and deferring to the power of the empires, the church relegates itself to the role of loyal cheerleader, commentator, and confessor.

Read More:

• Guide to Ethics and Morality
• Bioethics
• Roman Catholicism