Baby Tinslee: we ain't seen nothing yet.

When I write about many touchy subjects like the Tinslee case, I do it from the perspective of predicting the future.  Enough people weigh in with real time emotional sentiments and so I don't want to waste more time repeating all of this but I will say for the record that it is sad what is happening in this case but that's not going to change reality so it is, at the end of the day, what it is.

Tinslee is an 11 month old Texas baby who was dealt a shitty hand at birth.  She's got a rare, un-treatable heart disease along with chronic lung disease.  You can read the story here but essentially its a battle between the parents who want the child to be kept on life support as long as possible and the hospital who wants to pull the plug.  At this point, the courts have just sided with the hospital, giving them permission to pull the plug.

What's not said in so many words but which is obviously true is that the parents are asking the hospital to continue caring for their very sick child for free indefinitely, and the hospital is essentially saying, we've been charitable enough at this point, we want to be done with it and move on.  As we all know, care like this is VERY costly.  And if Tinslee's parents had any way to pay the bill then we would not be having this discussion.  They would either have decided to pull the plug to save their own finances OR they would be paying for the care and the hospital would not be complaining.  But I will bet anyone $1000 that Tinslee's family isn't planning on paying for much of anything.  Thus, from their perspective, no amount of care is too much, no amount of expense too great.  If their child had 1/1000000000000 % chance of living they would spend all the money in the world on her, just as long as someone else is footing the bill. 

For the hospital's part, they have done what they can to reduce their cost in this, including using drugs to paralyze the child so that the tubes aren't pulled out by movement.  A paralyzed patient is obviously going to be easier to manage than one that is moving about and too young to reason with.  The hospital is of course positioning it as an act of mercy to remove the child from life support and the parents are positioning it as an act of inhumanity.  Again, it's a shitty deal for the kid but that is just part of the human experience.  I once knew a beautiful young gal at AMD who was, IIRC 23 when she died of cancer.  That was a shitty deal too.  One of my best friends died at the age of 48, again of cancer.  Yup, another shitty deal.  But it happens and we have to accept that fact.

The reason I bother with all this is that going forward we are going to see a lot less cases that go on as long as Tinslee.  Right now at the end of a massive liberal expansion, people with no money actually believe they deserve free medical care at the cost of others.  This is going to change big time and the courts will support it.  In the future if you can't pay your bills you will simply be turned away.  How do I know?  Because that is what happens in all countries which do not have a strong currency which they can print from thin air or borrow endlessly in order to consume.  When the US loses control over the world's money supply, all of this fake goodwill is going to evaporate and hard economics are going to take over.  I say fake goodwill because it's not goodwill; it's just the current ability to pay given that we seem to have access to endless debt.  When the ability to take on new debt evaporates we will see just how rapidly the "goodwill" collapses.  At the end of the day, all problems are economic ones and to date we have used money printing and debt in order to soften every blow.  Those days are rapidly coming to an end whether or not people can see it coming.  I can see it coming and I'm pretty good at this sort of thing.

Today, the children's hospital isn't eating the cost of Tinslee's free medical care.  Nope.  Instead, they simply jack up the prices on everyone else.  This is the big reason why medical care is so expensive: too many people are getting too much free care.  But when things turn down and times are not as good across the board as they are today, people who can actually pay something are going to revolt about the high cost of basic medicine and in turn the hospitals are going to have to push back on indigent care.  Hospitals will become "paygo": you either have the money to pay or you need to go.  

Until recently, the courts have sided more with parents than with hospitals because nobody wants to be seen as heartless.  Tinsless got 11 months because of this.  Going forward it won't matter what the appearances are because economics will demand that those without the means to pay go off and die quietly somewhere.  We as a society will adapt to this over time.  But like it or not, it's coming.