Stephen Hawking Not Killed By U.K. Health Care System

by Metavirus on 10 August 2009

Is it me or has the concept of fact-checking gone completely out the window in today’s mainstream media? Here’s a recent excerpt from an article in the Investor’s Business Daily on health care reform:

The U.K.’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) basically figures out who deserves treatment by using a cost-utility analysis based on the “quality adjusted life year.”

One year in perfect health gets you one point. Deductions are taken for blindness, for being in a wheelchair and so on.

The more points you have, the more your life is considered worth saving, and the likelier you are to get care.

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Only one teeny-tiny, eensy-weensy problem with that logic, points out Steve Benen:

Now, it might be tempting to respond to the IBD piece by noting that the health care reform proposal backed by Democrats is in no way similar to the British health care system, so these mind-numbing comparisons don’t make any sense. That, of course, would be a fair response.

But let’s not overlook the punch-line here. As [Jay] Bookman noted, “Of course, that same Stephen Hawking who wouldn’t have a chance in the United Kingdom was in fact born in the United Kingdom, has lived his entire life in the United Kingdom and lives there still today, at the ripe old age of 67. (He was in fact hospitalized earlier this month [ed. note: at a publicly-funded NHS hospital].) Hawking is, you might say, living, breathing proof that these people are first-class fools.”

Ever wonder what the reform debate would be like if conservatives approached it with a shred of intellectual seriousness?

{ 21 comments }
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  1. Kim says:
    August 11, 2009 at 1:13 am

    Wow so they can look into what N.I.C.E get up too, but can't be bothered to look up where Stephen Hawkins lives, or they assuming that because he is a great Scientist that he MUST be American??

    Reply
  2. Alex says:
    August 11, 2009 at 2:04 am

    I though because he used a computer to speak he was Japanese, weird!

    Reply
  3. Gherald says:
    August 11, 2009 at 6:23 am

    I do think Stephen Hawking's care would be worse if for the past--say, 30 to 40 years--the American system had been like Canadian single-payer (or, worse yet, Britain's government-run)

    The reason is loss of incentives for innovation…i.e. I don't think his chair and vocalizer would be quite so nice if the American market were less robust.

    Reply
    • Kim says:
      August 11, 2009 at 11:01 am

      In his own Words

      ''However, a computer expert in California, called Walt Woltosz, heard of my plight. He sent me a computer program he had written, called Equalizer. This allowed me to select words from a series of menus on the screen, by pressing a switch in my hand. The program could also be controlled by a switch, operated by head or eye movement. When I have built up what I want to say, I can send it to a speech synthesizer. At first, I just ran the Equalizer program on a desk top computer.

      However David Mason, of Cambridge Adaptive Communication, fitted a small portable computer and a speech synthesizer to my wheel chair. This system allowed me to communicate much better than I could before. I can manage up to 15 words a minute. I can either speak what I have written, or save it to disk. I can then print it out, or call it back and speak it sentence by sentence. Using this system, I have written a book, and dozens of scientific papers. I have also given many scientific and popular talks. They have all been well received. I think that is in a large part due to the quality of the speech synthesiser, which is made by Speech Plus. One's voice is very important. If you have a slurred voice, people are likely to treat you as mentally deficient: Does he take sugar? This synthesiser is by far the best I have heard, because it varies the intonation, and doesn't speak like a Dalek. The only trouble is that it gives me an American accent.''
      http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php?option=com_co…

      so the original programme was sent to him for free by a American who felt sorry for him, and it was a British man who designed his wheelchair (or at least a small computer and voice sythesiser attached to it.

      so I'm slighlty confused as to what the American market being more robust has to do with it, as the entire time he has been cared for by the 'worse yet' British Health Care, sorry if I'm sounding slightly arrogant or mean I just don't understand what you point is

      XxX

      Reply
      • Jon says:
        August 11, 2009 at 11:06 am

        "I do think Stephen Hawking's care would be worse if for the past--say, 30 to 40 years--the American system had been like Canadian single-payer (or, worse yet, Britain's government-run)
        "

        I think his point was that Hawking was under the American Health Care system, which is not true -- ie I think it is he that has not understood the article, rather than you who can't understand him.

        Reply
        • Metavirus says:
          August 11, 2009 at 12:53 pm

          if gherald will grant me license to summarize, one of his main points is that the trillions of dollars we have pissed down the toilet in waste, fraud, graft and corruption in our current health care system has fueled all sorts of innovation around the globe. if we were to turn off the spigot of waste, all scientists around the world would immediately decrease their R&D output and we'll all become sicker and less new treatments will be discovered. something like that…

          Reply
          • Gherald says:
            August 11, 2009 at 8:51 pm

            It's not the elimination of waste, fraud, and corruption I object to, but the elimination of competition and incentives. We could reduce the former without hurting the later. A more public system like HR 3200 would not accomplish this.

            I advocate a less public system (i.e. paring down Medicare's costs) with better regulation of the insurance industry (e.g. moving away from employer-based, no price controls or minimum limits, and sold on exchanges that don't deny for previous conditions)

            Under the more public reforms, I don't think R&D output would immediately decrease. I would expect it to be unchanged or even increase slightly for a few years as researchers switch gears, then decrease over the ensuing decades.

            Reply
      • Gherald says:
        August 11, 2009 at 8:58 pm

        I'm slighlty confused as to what the American market being more robust has to do with it, as the entire time he has been cared for by the 'worse yet' British Health Care, sorry if I'm sounding slightly arrogant or mean I just don't understand what you point is

        My point is that, on the whole, innovations like this 'Equalizer' program--and the innovations that lead to it, and the innovations that came after it--would have come later or been inferior if American dynamism had been replaced with a national system decades earlier.

        Reply
        • Metavirus says:
          August 11, 2009 at 9:04 pm

          and by "dynamism", gherald means an American health care system that so grossly overspends on everything from drugs to equipment to doctors to [etc.] that health products companies in other countries are incentivized to dump tons of money into R&D because the idiots in the U.S. will dump bushels of cash on them for their efforts. so, in that way, he has a point. the day you put the 700-pound neighborhood glutton on a diet is the day the corner grocer starts worrying about how to pay for his daughter's tuition.

          Reply
    • True North says:
      August 11, 2009 at 10:15 pm

      As a Canadian all I can say in reply is that you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Poor people don't die for lack of care under our system, they do under yours. And all you care about is how fancy an American made wheel chair is. Are you for real?

      Reply
  4. Jon says:
    August 11, 2009 at 8:56 pm

    Following the link, I found the following "correction" has been posted:

    Editor's Note: This version corrects the original editorial which implied that physicist Stephen Hawking, a professor at the University of Cambridge, did not live in the UK.

    Funny how they fail to admit the error of the larger point. Stephen Hawking no longer appears in the article in any context.

    Reply
    • Metavirus says:
      August 11, 2009 at 9:01 pm

      it's one of the biggest problems i have with people/entities in this country: no one hardly ever issues a satisfying apology. everything is spin and "oh, I'm sorry you took what I said that way". fuckheads.

      Reply
      • schu says:
        August 13, 2009 at 12:51 am

        If you cannot prove your case and/or made errors in your presentation you then rewrite it and pretend that you never made an error. Situation ethics at it’s best.

        Reply
  5. Metavirus says:
    August 11, 2009 at 10:24 pm

    Gherald believes that America is the one place in the industrializedworld where a freely available public option would destroy innovation,bankrupt the country and, apparently, somehow kill lots of peopleby… I don't know how. I think the facts on the ground from theexperience of every other rich nation that's done it militates againsthis position but when the overriding consideration is a rapacious fearof government, I guess there's not much one can say in order to getthrough.

    Reply
    • Gherald says:
      August 11, 2009 at 11:44 pm

      It would not destroy innovation AND bankrupt the country. It would do one or the other. Expanding the existing Medicare to cover all patients would bankrupt the country. A Canadian-like system (pared-down version of Medicare) would destroy innovation.

      Over time, more people will die because there won't be as many new treatments to cure them. Analogy can be made to France's 1.9% GDP growth year-over-year and the U.S.'s 2.9%--the U.S. has higher inequality, but the whole country is richer in the long run.

      Comparison to what's happened in other nations with national health-care doesn't hold water, because it's easy to create a public system that offers better treatment in the here-and-now. I have no doubt that poor people in the US could be given better access to care. But if, in the process of doing so, we continue to wittle away at the last relatively-free market--thus decreasing innovation and cause future health-care to stagnate near current levels (but more widely available)--that's not a bargain I'm willing to make.

      Reply
  6. Kim says:
    August 11, 2009 at 10:24 pm

    The Wheelchair isn't American made, I know its sounds really whiney of me to point it out, but it isn't the softwear which lets him speak in American, but not the Wheelchair
    XxX

    Reply
  7. Metavirus says:
    August 13, 2009 at 3:30 pm

    (mischievous grin)

    Reply

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