And In This Corner

Last year, SSM Health, a network of 23 hospitals, began using a points system to ration access to Regeneron. The drug would be given to patients only if they netted 20 points or higher. Being “non-White or Hispanic” counted for seven points, while obesity got you only one point—even though, according to the CDC, “obesity may triple the risk of hospitalization due to a COVID-19 infection.” Based on this scoring system, a 40-year-old Hispanic male in perfect health would receive priority over an obese, diabetic 40-year-old white woman with asthma and hypertension.
Shadi Hamid "Race-Based Rationing Is Real—And Dangerous"

The article is subtitled: "The cultural left’s worldview is beginning to distort health policy." I take exception to that because it implies that health policy is not already distorted.

And when patients had long bone fractures or acute pain from other types of traumatic injuries, black people were 41% less likely to get pain medication than white people.
Nonwhite patients get less pain relief in U.S. emergency rooms

I don't know about you, but a greater willingness to withhold pain medication from people with broken bones seems pretty distorted to me.

The problem, as I see it, with SSM Health's scoring system for access to Regeneron isn't that is privileges some hypothetical "40-year-old Hispanic male in perfect health" over an equally hypothetical "obese, diabetic 40-year-old white woman with asthma and hypertension." It's the implicit assumption that such a matchup would never occur, because any given 40-year-old Hispanic male who walks through the doors of one of their hospitals is presumed to be in such poor condition that an obese, diabetic, asthmatic and hypertensive white woman is still far likely to be in better overall health than he is.

Mr. Hamid makes the point that outrage is tempting. I think part of the reason for that is that outrage tends to be inward looking. Aaron Sibarium's articles struck a chord with many White readers because they justified a feeling of being unfairly devalued in the eyes of "the cultural Left." But there's another way of looking at it, namely, "Crap... how on Earth is it true that the medical establishment has come to see simply being Black as being correlated with so many health problems, that it's like being a White person of retirement age?"

Lost in all of the "outrage" about "wokeness" and "rationing" is the understanding that the collective health of Black and Hispanic people in the United States is an utter disaster; at least as far as the health care system is concerned. Because holding up some hypothetical Black teenager "in perfect health" to an ailing, middle-aged White person makes for a better conflict, and thus, magazine headlines.

One of my recurring themes on this blog has become the degree to which Americans see themselves as impoverished, and thus, released from any obligation to share resources with one another. This is just another example. It's also an example of how the past of the United States is conveniently forgotten. The factors that led to Black people, Hispanics, Native Americas and no doubt others having such poor collective health didn't all simply dry up and blow away once the Civil Rights Acts were all passed and signed into law. Their effects lingered, and, in some cases are still active and impacting people.

But the overall understanding is that, as a nation, we are too broke to fix these things. And so it makes sense to tell people that they should be able to work hard and find good-paying jobs to lift themselves out of poverty while sending as many jobs as can be managed overseas, specifically because people there will work for less that it costs to support oneself here. And the United States condemns to make-work jobs millions of people that society has spent between 10 and 15 thousand dollars a year to educate for 13 years. Over 160 thousand dollars spent, and the consensus is that they're good for flipping burgers, bagging groceries or preparing coffee. And given the general competition for low-skilled work, precisely because it doesn't require an expensive college degree, a number of people are doomed to long-term, if not perpetual, unemployment.

Outrage is easier than solutions. And likely more satisfying, too. And certainly a lot less expensive. At least for the individual.

The ironic thing about all of this is that if, as a nation, the United States weren't so good at pitting groups against one another to fight to be valued, there wouldn't be a need to continuously fight over who is worthy of being valued. Were the United States genuinely the wealthy nation it portrays itself as, there wouldn't be this pervasive sense that there aren't enough necessities to go around. And in a further irony, the United States doesn't see itself as being poor enough that it needs all of the human capital that it has. So much human potential is wasted, allowed to wither away and die, because putting it to work would mean sharing the benefits of that work.

But maybe it's all that, all of it, that drives the outrage. I don't find much value in anger, but I know a lot of people who see it as a valuable first step to greater change. And in that, the anger feels like doing something. And when people buckle under to the anger, editing out the targets of outrage, perhaps it seem like change. Even though tomorrow, the problem remains the same.