James Kim: What Not to Do

Last night my wife and I were channel surfing and I landed on a show called I Shouldn’t Be Alive which featured an old story from 2006 about a family on a road trip in Oregon which culminated in the father’s death (and thankfully the rescue of the other 3 family members).

These programs do not typically interest me.  I have found that since the birth of my son, tragic stories affect me significantly.  Last Friday my wife dragged me to see the Lion King in 3D to which I acquiesced only as an anniversary favor.   Now that I have become a father, it was like seeing the film again for the first time.  I have to admit, I got a little emotional at parts.  The death of Mufasa is heavy when you have a kid (who cries when you leave for work).

Anyway, back to this story about the Kims.  This story was new to me.  Here’s the leadup to their predicament:

• They are in an SUV on a road trip in Oregon following Thanksgiving. with two children, ages 4 and 6 months
• They decide (for whatever reason) to make reservations at a B&B rather than stop at a motel for the night.
• It’s already after dark and the B&B is 6 hours away
• The B&B owner tells them specifically not to come, as they are hard to find, especially after 6 hours of driving
• They decide to go anyway and barrel on.
• It’s now 10pm or so.  They realize they missed the turn about 15 miles ago.
• Rather than turn back, they pull over and pull out a map.
• Kati Kim suggests driving on Bear Mountain road, which is in the middle of the forest – this is obvious on the map by the lack of any side roads, towns, or signs of civilization for 100 miles of road.
• James and Kati ignore the sign leading onto the road which states, “WARNING, this road can get blocked by snow in the winter”, a.k.a., “Enter at your own risk”
• It starts snowing.  A lot.  They push forward.
• James makes a wrong turn on this road.  In his defense, it wasn’t so much a turn as it was a fork – he should have stayed left but instead veered right.
• Normally, the fork has a closed gate because it’s a logging road which closes in the winter, but for some reason it was open.
• The snow gets so bad that they can’t continue to drive.  Visibility is zero and traction is going to hell.
• James is exhausted, lost, and stuck in a blizzard.   They decide to park, sleep through the blizzard, and try to get going again in the morning.
• They run the car all night to keep it heated.
• In the morning they wake up to find that they do not have enough gas left to reverse course and get back to the highway; also, it is still snowing.
• They decide to camp in the car for 7 days.
• On day 8, James Kim decides to leave the car to attempt to get help, wearing only a pair of jeans.  At least he had a winter jacket.  He does not return.
• Also on day 8, a guy who works for the phone company essentially breaks the law by illegally tracking the Kim’s cell phones (after this story has made national news media) and reports the last cell location to the police
• On day 9, a private citizen with a private helicoptor who is familiar with this road decides to start searching.  He concludes there’s a good chance they may have made a wrong turn on the road and finds the car.  Kati and the 2 children are rescued.
• On day 12, the body of James Kim is discovered only 2 miles from the car.

As my wife and I were watching this story unfold, we couldn’t help but put our palms to our faces.  We’ve both watched enough Bear Grylls to know how many mistakes this family made.  I hate hearing James Kim called a hero because he’s anything but.  He and his wife were irresponsible and fool hardy.  I wouldn’t wish harm on either of them or their children – I am glad 3 of them survived – but considering the volume of poor decisions they made, it’s miraculous that any of them survived at all.  Given their choices, they really should have died.

Let’s go over the mistakes they made, one by one.

1.  Take chances in unfamiliar areas late at night in the winter with children in the car.

It’s one thing to embrace the spirit of adventure when you’re alone or with your girlfriend or wife and decide to drive into the unknown.  It’s quite another to do it when there are children in the car.  These guys decided to go far out of their way late at night where bad weather is possible just to stay at a specific hotel?  Come on.  They stopped to eat at Denny’s for crying out loud.  Is Motel 8 not good enough for them?

2.  Take a road with no obvious rest stops or signs of civiilization with giant warning signs stating that the road gets treacherous in the winter.

When I visit my parents in New Jersey, we often take I-95 even though it costs toll money and is prone to traffic simply because there are rest stops like clock work.  When you’re traveling with children, you always have to take the route that has things like toilets and restaurants.  I don’t understand the Kims’ thinking when they decided to take Bear Mountain road.  There were signs that said, “Hey, this road might be blocked by snow in the winter.”  Did they figure, “oh, it’s snowing, it won’t be blocked?”  Could they not tell that snow was in the air?  I can almost always tell when it’s going to snow.  I try not to be driving when it’s about to snow.  Could they not see that the road they were taking would take them straight into mountains?

Look, if a sign says, “this road may be blocked by snow drifts”, and my choices are to drive 100 miles down this road or turn around and go 15 miles back to take the road I’m supposed to take (the one that goes through civlization), I’ll go 15 miles back every time.  Why?  Well, aside from the reasons above, what happens if you go down Bear Mountain road, get 90 miles in, and then find that it’s blocked because of a snow drift or a fallen tree?  Plus, the Kims were already prepared to drive 6 hours to get to a B&B.  What’s another 15 minutes of back tracking?

3.  Continue driving when it began to snow.

As my wife will tell you, and as I will readily admit, I am a coward when it comes to driving in the snow.  As I tell her, so will you be after you snap an axle on a curb because your car won’t turn left in the snow.  It’s one thing to drive on an interstate when it starts to snow (don’t).  It’s entirely another to drive on a mountain pass in the snow when you’re the only car you’ve seen all night.  Even had I made all the other mistakes that the Kims made this far, the minute it started to snow on this road I would have turned to my wife and said, “I’m sorry honey, but this is not happening.  Let’s get back to the highway and find the next Motel 8.”

4.  Leave the car running all night to keep the heat on.

I can understand wanting to keep your children warm.  I really can.  However, if I found myself in James Kim’s position at this point in his story, this is how my thought process would have gone:

• I am lost on a remote mountain road on which I have seen no other cars all night
• It is snowing and I do not know how long it will continue or how deep the resulting snow is going to be
• If we can’t continue driving tonight, we may wake up tomorrow and discover that we are completely unable to move the car
• If that happens, we may be stuck here for a while
• If we are stuck here for a while, we need to conserve fuel
• If we run the car continuously, we will run out of gas pretty quick
• If we run out of gas, we have no way of rewarming our bodies.
• We’re in deep shit.

Cars are notoriously bad at heat retention.  They are not good insulators.  Too much glass.  Human bodies, on the other hand, are good insulators.  It takes a long time of protracted exposure to cold air for hypothermia to set in.  If you rewarm your body in bursts, that heat will be retained a lot better than if you try to keep the air in the car heated.  So, starting that night, I would have started the car, ran it at full heat until we’re nearly sweating, and then turned it off for an hour or so, until we’re all shivering again.  It would have been a crappy night, but with all the warm clothes they had and a lot of cuddling, it would have been doable.

Instead, the Kims probably panicked, or misjudged how much fuel is burned by idling an engine, or possibly fell victim to a 4 year old girl crying “daddy, I’m cold!”  Either way, it was the wrong choice.

The Kims should have entered survival mode the minute they realized they were snowed in on a remote mountain road.

5.  Decide to wait for rescue.

All they needed to do was get out of the car, look around, and realize where they were.  During and after a blizzard, how likely is it that another vehicle is going to come down this road?  If you can’t drive in the snow, neither can anyone else!

When you get yourself into a bind like this – especially in November where it’s only going to get colder and the snow is only going to get deeper, waiting around and hoping someone is going to stumble upon you is just about the worst thing you can do.

Still, the fact that it was actively snowing for the first couple of days means that it may have been the right thing for them to do to at least wait for it to stop snowing.  But this family waited 7 days before they decided to take action.

The problem with waiting is that from the minute you find yourself stuck in the cold, the clock is ticking.  Every minute you are getting just a little bit weaker.  Your supplies are getting lower.  Your chance of survival is decreasing – slowly at first, and then very quickly as time goes on.

They may have thought that they were too far away from anything to be able to get anywhere on foot.  If I were alone, on foot, in ideal ground conditions, I can cover 3 miles per hour pretty easily – and if my family’s life were at stake I could probably do 4.  That means that if I left at dawn, I should be able to cover 30 miles by dusk.  Even in ankle-deep snow I’m sure I could do 2 miles per hour, which gives me about 18 miles per day, give or take – and that assumes I stop at dusk.

That means even had I driven 100 miles into the mountains, I could get back to a highway in 3 or 4 days.  The Kims waited 7 before even attempting to get help.  That’s pretty staggering.  The reality is that they were about 17 miles down a logging road, which means James Kim should have been back to the Bear Mountain road in one day.

One reason the Kims didn’t take action earlier is probably because they felt as though the car offered them critical warmth and protection at night.  Kati Kim may also have whined about being left alone with the children, which is a fair concern, but James should have simply said, “Listen, our lives are at stake.  We can’t cover enough ground with the children in tow.  We need to move fast.  I can move faster and you need to feed the baby.  I might die trying to get help, but we’ll all die if we sit here in the car and expect someone to find us.”

The big concern is nighttime survival.  You can’t keep walking all night because you need sleep and it gets really, really cold.  You need to take a break and rewarm your body or you will surely die of hypothermia.  I assumed that they correctly realized this and didn’t choose to leave the car because they had no way of staying warm, and then I found later that they had matches with them.

I don’t have matches in my car, so I might have been screwed were this me instead of them.  But you have a car with gasoline, you have a lot of flammable kindling (paper) and you’re in a green pine forest.  Were I James, I would have taken the matches, taken the paper, and the car’s tire iron – it’s not an axe, but a few good whacks on a small tree branch could break it off.  Pine burns well and puts out a lot of white smoke.  I would have planned on building a fire.

The program wasn’t clear on how deep the snow was, which is a shame.  Snow makes a great insulator.  If you can dig yourself a little snow burrow, you can stay quite warm.  I remember when I was a kid I used to dig tunnels in the giant mounds the snow plow would leave at the end of the cul-de-sac.  One night I slept in one of them.  I had a sleeping bag, but I didn’t wear a coat – just sweats.  So if my fire failed, I could always make a little snow burrow.

James also failed to insulate himself properly.  Since they were on a road trip they should have had multiple outfits.  Why didn’t he put on two pairs of pants (if he had them?)  If not, why didn’t he roll up any clothes that weren’t being used to keep the family warm in the car and stuff them in his pants?  If all else failed, he should have ripped up a seat of the car and used the foam in the same way – shove them in your pants and put an air barrier between your skin and the cold air.

My biggest concern in leaving the car and striking out would be bears.  There’s really no defense against bears unless you can build a fire.  I’m not 100% sure that bears are afraid of fire.  For all I know they may be drawn to it.

So far, all of these mistakes are serious, but this one trumps them all:

6.  Try to move through the woods “as the crow flies” when you aren’t sure exactly where you are

Of all the survival blunders this family made, the one that amazes me is James Kim’s choice to pick an arbitrary direction and travel through the woods.

Out here on the east coast most of our woodlands are in relatively flat country.  He was in the mountains of Oregon, in the snow.  What was he thinking?!  It would be hard enough to navigate that country in the middle of summer. let alone in the snow when you’ve been essentially freezing and starving for 7 days already.  By the time James set out he was already depleted.

I really, really cannot understand why he did not walk along the roads.  He should have known which road he came down.  If you don’t know where you are exactly, but you’re on a road that you got to in your car, you can always, always back track.

Have you noticed that the Man vs. Wild typically ends when Bear Grylls finds a road?  If not a road, then he usually says, “okay, well I’ve found a river so it’s only a matter of time before I’m saved.”  That’s because on roads, there might be cars.  Once you flag down the first car you see, you and your family are saved.

But instead, James tried to guess where he was.  He guessed wrong.  Even had he guessed right, walking along a road, even if the road is covered in snow, is the only correct thing to do in this situation.  You will be able to move exponentially faster on a road than overland, you have zero chance of becoming disoriented and going in the wrong direction, there is less tree cover on the road which means you are more likely to be spotted from the air, and if anyone is looking for you, they’re going to start with the roads because they’re not looking for hikers, they’re looking for an SUV.

If for some reason the logging road was so covered in snow and so poorly demarcated that he couldn’t tell where the road was, at least moving in the general direction of the road would have caused him to intersect with Bear Mountain road even had he done some of the trip in brush.

The result is that James probably traveled around 17 miles in total before succumbing to exposure but was only 2 miles away from where he started.  He was essentially stumbling around in the wilderness.  Had he simply gone back the way he came – and he could have easily figured that out by the tracks his car left – he would have gone 17 miles down the logging road, arrived at Bear Mountain Road, been able to realize the mistake he made that first night (because he had the map with him and would be able to see that he accidentally veeered off onto a logging road).  I understand that even by morning the car’s tracks would have vanished, but on the first night he should have made a note of which way he came.  His car was stopped at a 3 way fork, so it would have been critical to know which of the 3 forks they came from so he could do the reverse trip.

If you can’t find a road, the next best thing is to follow the flow of a river – it will lead to progressively larger rivers and eventually people, because people live along side rivers (and because there are no trees in rivers, you’ll be more likely spotted along the bank of a river).

Ultimately, this one decision – going through brush instead of on the road – is why James Kim is dead.  For all I know, by day 7 he was already so incapacitated that he was not mentally able to think straight and make the right decision, but I didn’t get that impression from listening to his wife Kati tell the story.

It really upsets me that this program, I Shouldn’t Be Alive, did not point out these mistakes.  I thought it was common knowledge that you’re not supposed to stay in a car if you’re snowbound in the winter (because it’s barely better than being outside).  I also thought it was obvious common knowledge that when you’re lost the first thing you’re supposed to do is find either a road or a river and follow it.  The fact that he was already on a road and chose to go off the road is mind boggling, and the fact that the narrator of this program did not finish this episode with a brief bullet list is a disservice to its viewers.  Had I produced this program, I would have finished it with this advice:

• Avoid driving on remote roads in bad weather; if weather changes for the worse, turn around.
• Ration fuel from the moment you realize that you are stranded – do not wait for morning to begin conserving gasoline
• Do not wait for rescue in remote areas – prepare to hike out as soon as you realize you are in trouble
• Go back in the direction that you came along the road that you took, unless you are absolutely positive where you are and that help is closer in a different direction – but always stay on the road
• Insulate, insulate, insulate.

I strongly suspect that the producers of this show were only able to air this story by promising to portray James Kim as the heroic father who died trying to save his children instead of a dufus who made every possible mistake and broke every survival rule in the book.  Unfortunately, the truth is that he’s a dufus who made every possible mistake and broke every survival rule in the book, and that’s why he’s dead.  It’s a tragedy.  My heart goes out to him and his family.  No children should be deprived of their father.  But it needs to be said and it needs to be known so that the next family who winds up stranded in the mountains in winter doesn’t think back to James Kim and think to himself, “hey, I know, I’ll just camp in my car for 9 days and hope a helicoptor finds me.”

Also, to the haters: I am aware that hindsight is 20/20, but this isn’t the type of scenario where knowing the future would have been important.  If I were writing this in that vein I would have said that the only mistake James Kim made was leaving in the first place since had he stayed with his family for another 2 days he would have been rescued along with them and would still be alive today.

I am also appreciative of the fact that actually being in this situation is a lot different than looking back on it.  It’s entirely possible that James Kim thought of everything I am writing here today at the time but made the decisions he made for different reasons, such as gripping fear, or a wife who begged him not to leave her alone (which he didn’t have the balls to ignore).  Regardless of what he may or may not have felt or thought during this ordeal, it’s what he did and did not do which caused his death, and all of the other factors are immaterial.  If a man knows that a piano is about to fall on his head but factors unknown cause him not to move, he is still dead when it lands.

The take-away message of this post is this:

Watch Bear Grylls so you know what to do in a crisis.

 

Yes, let him die

Susan Grigsby is a disingenous liberal idiot.  Here’s why.

This video on YouTube is trending.

It was uploaded by what appears to be a MoveOn.org lackey.  It’s your typical sob story about an uninsured guy dying of cancer.  As expected, comments are disabled on the video to preempt the comments which would invariably result, which I’ll discuss here.

First, shame on Ron Paul for vacilating and not giving the firm answer that he should have given.  Were I asked that question in a presidential debate, here’s exactly how I would have responded:

This is exactly the problem with the health care debate in America; namely, that empathetic sob stories about uninsured dead and dying loved ones have a place in debate on public policy.  They don’t.  People die all the time – and on a long enough timeline we all die no matter how much money we throw at a hospital to treat us, no matter how much of that money we earned or how much was contributed by an insurance company or our federal government.   The phrasing of your question is deceptive – you are silently asserting that if only I taxed the rich and dumped money on your unemployed (effectively) retired brother he would have lived.  Nobody can make that type of guarantee.  Taxing the wealthy doesn’t save lives.  Here’s the truth, let me spell it out – health care is a finite resource.  We don’t have the doctors or hospital beds available at costs that the government can afford to subsidize to allow us to provide an unending supply of health care to every person in the country.  We have to handle it the same way we handle virtually every other form of supply and demand in our economy: with market forces.  The government can subsidize, which we do – with medicare and medicaid – but there are limits.  What good is another 10 years of life if you, and everyone around you, is living it in poverty thanks to the economic straits the types of extremes required to pump chemotherapy into every cancer ridden American would dump us in?  I mourn your brother’s death but I won’t take responsibility for it and I won’t ask 300 million of my countrymen to take responsibility for it either.

But what really disturbs me about this add are two key points, namely:

“He worked full time, all the time, but at the age of 55, he was replaced by a young man.”

We can presume that since Steve lost his insurance when he lost his job to a younger man that said young man did not have insurance until acquiring the job.  With that in mind, what if we had phrased a different question to Ron Paul?  Suppose we had asked Ron Paul this:

Congressman Paul, if you had to choose between insuring a young man in his early 20′s with his life and family ahead of him and a man of 55 whose best years were behind him, which would you choose?

But that’s an unfair question because people in their 20′s are not likely to develop lung cancer.  I won’t ask how Steve got lung cancer at the age of 63.  Could it be that Steve smoked his entire life?  Shucks.  Far be it for me to imply that Steve had some hand in his own fate.  When Steve was laid off at age 55, nobody – not his employers or the government body which declared the minimum age for medicare coverage - had a crystal ball and could predict that Steve would get cancer at 63 and die.  If they had, then this question might be better directed at those people.  How could they, not Mr. Paul or anyone else, let Steve die?  No, in order for this to be fair (and to even matter), we’d need to assume that the young man in question, who stole Steve’s job right from under him, would also get cancer 8 years after the fact.  So let’s say for the sake of argument that our young man who stole Steve’s job and his insurance is 30 when he gets cancer.  How about this question, Mr. Paul?

Congressman Paul, if you had to choose between letting a 30 year old man die of cancer and a 63 year old man die of cancer, which would you choose and why?

The answer’s obvious, isn’t it?

But Evan!  You’re missing the point!  If only we taxed the rich more, we could provide health care for everyone and the issue would be moot!

Indeed, if we provided health care insurance for everyone this issue might in fact be moot.  It’s a shame that’s not what this video addresses in even the slightest capacity.  Instead of asking GOP candidates whether they would have let her brother die  - which I hope by now is an irrelevant sideshow to the matter at hand – she should have asked this question:

Congressman Paul, it is a fact that more and more older Americans - say those over the age of 50 – are facing insurmountable competition for what few jobs we have left from younger, cheaper employees.  When an older worker loses his job but is still too young for Medicare,  what do we to to help him avoid losing coverage when he needs it most?

That’s a fantastic question because it cuts right to the heart of the matter and gives Congressman Paul a chance to dazzle us with his acumen and provide an actual solution.  Here are some solutions off the top of my head:

• Incentivize the hiring of older workers by offering a tax break per employee over the age of 55
• Lower the age of eligibility for Medicare for people who are still working to 55, and allow them to stay on Medicare if they lose their job before the retired eligibility age
• Allow early enrollment in Medicare in exchange for reduced future Social Security collections
• Require companies who lay off employees over the age of 55 to continue to offer healthcare benefits through their provider for the same monthly cost the employee paid while employed, until he becomes eligible for Medicare

There, I just came up with 4 possible solutions in as many minutes.  I don’t know how cost effective any of those are going to be – that research needs to be done – but you get the idea.

But instead, the MoveOn.org agenda is to tell us a sob story about a washed out 55 year-old smoker who couldn’t find another job and died of cancer at 63.

You know, my grandmother had health insurance and she died of lung cancer too, and she was only 56.  What does that story mean for public policy?  I’m asking because I honestly don’t understand how the liberal mind manages to transform these anecdotes into multi-trillion dollar spending plans.  I’m sure the policy answer is “tax the rich” but if someone could please enlighten me, that would be fantastic.

Second, at 1:10, this woman mentions that her brother Steve went through radiation.

Woah, stop the fucking presses.  Let me get this straight.  Steve did in fact get treatment for his cancer and died anyway?  That’s surely never happened in the history of medicine.

But maybe, and I’m just spitballing here – maybe we should be focussing on the fact that Steve went through treatment despite the fact that he didn’t have any insurance.  So what’s the fucking point of this video?!

She never bothers to say, at any point, that the treatment was somehow wanting for lack of funds, that he could not afford the treatment he needed because he didn’t have insurance, most likely because it’s a big fat lie.  He probably got the type of treatment he needed and died anyway because cancer kills and by the time they’re finding spots on your lungs your odds are already not great.

Here’s what this woman says, verbatim:

The spot was found on Steve’s lung on December 3rd, 2010.  Within 5 months, he went through radiation, he went through some therapy, he had been warehoused.  He slowly, painfully, he couldn’t stand up, the cancer went into his nerves, into his spine.  5 months later, he died.  That’s what it means to let someone die.

She then asks:

Do you as a candidate for president really believe that if an American cannot or does not get insurance that they should be treated the way Steve was?  Do you really believe that?

I’m not a candidate, but I’ll answer you.

If by “treated the way Steve was” you mean receive radiation treatment and therapy, then by all means, yes I do!

Let me tell you about the way Steve wasn’t treated – he wasn’t treated as owner of a life every American’s personal responsibility was in 2010 to save.  He wasn’t treated as the recipient of tax dollars reluctantly offered to the coffers under penalty of imprisonment.  He wasn’t treated by strangers the way he was treated by his sister who of course would rather see Steve live even if it meant the rest of the country suffers because after all, the rest of the country is not her problem.

People die.  I’m sorry for your loss, Susan, but get over it.  I won’t pay Steve’s healthcare bill and I won’t pay yours.  I have my own family’s healthcare bills to worry about.

Healthcare Bieberisms

I was having a riveting conversation with a few Canadian young people the other day (ages 17 to 24).  As is usual with Canadians, they felt the need to berate the United States.  In my experience, it seems almost reflexive from our northern cousins, as if in order to self-identity and to justify their existence as Canadians, they must point out some contrast with America.  That contrast, of course, makes Canada look good and the U.S. look bad.  Apparently, the only tool suitable for this purpose is to tout Canadian healthcare.  I can’t really blame them.  What else could they bring up?  The weather, certainly not.  The economy?  Hah.

I find that the overwhelming majority of Canadians with whom I’ve had the displeasure of conversing rotely recite what has become what I call a Bieberism, after who else but Justin, who said this on the matter:

[The United States] is evil.  Canada’s the best country in the world. We go to the doctor and we don’t need to worry about paying him, but here, your whole life, you’re broke because of medical bills. My bodyguard’s baby was premature, and now he has to pay for it. In Canada, if your baby’s premature, he stays in the hospital as long as he needs to, and then you go home.

Yes, for whichever reason, Canadians believe that their healthcare is free.  I attempted to point out the fallacy in the thinking to those Canadians with which I was conversing.  It went like this:

Me: You do realize that your health care is not free, right?

Them: Yes it is; when I go to a doctor, I don’t have to pay!

Me: But you do have to pay.  The doctors, nurses, and hospital staff aren’t working for free.  Someone is paying, and that someone is you, in the form of government taxes.

Them: Yeah.  But in both countries you have to pay tons of taxes.  In Canada, our taxes go to healthcare so we don’t go bankrupt on medical bills, but in America your taxes go to useless illegal wars in Iraq LOL!

Me: Point taken, but if the United States government tacked on another 10 to 15% on our money to put our taxes on par with Canada we could probably afford socialist health care too.  We don’t want socialist health care!

Them: That’s why you’re evil.  You don’t care if people get sick and can’t get treatment; you enjoy making people lose everything to pay medical bills, etc. etc.

Me: I’ll get to that in a moment, but let me drive this home first.  Can you at least agree with me that your health care is not, as you put it, free?  That you do, in fact, pay for it?

Them: Fine, we do pay for it, but we never have to shell money out to a doctor so no matter how much it costs, we won’t go bankrupt on bills.  We just pay a fixed rate with taxes.

Me: Okay.  If you believe the hype, I’m one of the tiny minority of Americans who has health insurance, the cost of which I pay only a fraction (about 25%).  I do have to pay the doctor some small pittance each time I see him, but the overwhelming majority of the cost is covered by insurance, so for the sake of argument, let’s call the insurance deductible negligible, since it’s easily affordable.  I don’t pay anything at the doctor’s office either, so would you call my health insurance free?

Them: Well for you, yes, because you have insurance, but so many Americans don’t and you don’t care!  EVIL!

Me: So you think it’s inherently evil to expect a person to do something to deserve health insurance?  In my case, I earned my insurance by acquiring gainful employment at a company who, in addition to my salary, compensates me with health insurance.

Them: YES!  Health care is a right!

Me: That doesn’t sound very fair to the doctors, nurses, and hospitals.

Them: What do you mean?!

Me: Well, I write software for a living.  If someone told me that I was required to write software for someone else merely because that person exists, I would probably ask why.  I consider my life to be valuable, and I view my life as time.  If I’m lucky I’ll have around 75 years of time, give or take, on this earth.  If you’re lucky, you have the same.  Why should I spend my time doing something for you, unless you’re spending time doing something for me, too?  That sounds reasonable and fair to me.  Am I wrong?

Them: Yes but the doctors and nurses and hospitals get paid, and they volunteered to become these things.  It’s not like someone put a gun to their heads and forced them.

Me: That is very true, nobody put a gun to their heads and they are in fact getting paid.  But they’re getting paid by a governmental body whose revenue is tightly coupled to taxable income.  If you’re the best doctor in Canada, you’re not going to make more money than the worst doctor in Canada because there’s a very fixed amount of money to go around in the Canadian health system.

Them: That’s not true… brain surgeons in Canada make more money than family practice doctors.

Me: Yes, of course, and the doctor with 30 years of experience is going to make more than the first year practicing, but my point about the ceiling remains.  There’s no market for health care in Canada.  That means there are no market forces.  Excellence isn’t disproportionaly rewarded, and neither is mediocrity.  In a normal market, the best product commands the highest price.  In a socialist market, like Canadian health care, which isn’t even a market at all, prices are essentially fixed.

Them: That’s a good thing.  It means evil insurance companies can’t drive the costs sky high, etc. etc.

Me: Actually, insurance companies want costs to be low.  Malpractice insurance coupled with a high standard of care is what drives the costs sky high, not to mention the market economy of doctor skill, which is where I’m gonig with this.

Them: What?

Me: Look, the truth is that nobody ever travels to Canada to get health care, and the reason is obvious – since taxes pay the doctors’ bills, if you’re not a Canadian citizen, you didn’t pay taxes, so the Canadian government isn’t going to give you care for free.  Before I go on, don’t you see the irony in that truth?

Them: No.

Me: The entire premise of a collective health insurance system is that by everyone paying taxes into the health care pot, no one person will go bankrupt taking care of their own medical needs.  Just as you contribute a little bit to everyone else’s health, they contribute to yours, and as such, it’s better for everyone.  That’s the premise.  Except the share-and-share-alike is limited only to Canadians, i.e., only people who paid into the pot.  Somehow, Canadians view this as more fair than simply expecting each person to take care of his or her own health care.

Them: It is!

Me: Is it?  Well, then riddle me this: I proposed that expecting someone to earn health care is perfectly fair.  You claimed that health care is a right, and therefore you should not be expected to earn it.  But I would be turned away at a Canadian hospital because I am a United States citizen.  If health care is a right, I should get treatment in your hospitals.  The truth is that Canada does require people to earn health care in their country.  They just make it extremely simple – you earn it by becoming a Canadian citizen.  If you happen to be born in Canada then you’ve already earned it.

Them: What’s your point?

Me: My point is that ultimately we see things the same basic way.  In America, we earn healthcare by paying for it outright or by paying for insurance (or by not paying for insurance by getting it free from an employer).  In Canada, you earn healthcare simply by being born.  I don’t know about you, but “being born” doesn’t strike me as much of an accomplishment.

Them: You’re evil!

Me: Right.  Anyway, let me get back to the point about health care markets and why Canadians come to the United States for treatment.  They come here for treatment because we have very talented doctors who have high success rates for saving people’s lives.

Them: We have smart doctors in Canada too, you know.

Me: Granted, but as a Canadian doctor no matter how good you are, you can’t charge your patients commensurate with your skill and success rates.  An American doctor can.

Them: That’s evil and greedy!

Me: No, it’s a market economy.  Look, the only reason anyone ever does anything is to reap some kind of reward.  Even people who do charity work do it because it rewards them in some way, e.g., it makes them feel better about themselves.  When it comes to medical careers, many doctors strive to become successful and pioneering so that they can be rewarded, e.g., make millions of dollars.  It is true that many doctors seek to become amazing doctors because they want to save lives, and that should certainly not be overlooked, but not every one will.

Them: So?

Me: So in America, we have some really amazing doctors giving care that is unavailable every where else on the planet.

Them: Yes but nobody can afford it LOL!

Me: Some people can, such as the Canadians who flock here to get it, such as the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, Danny Williams, who had heart surgery in Florida in 2010, about which he was quoted as saying, “I did not sign away my right to get the best possible health care for myself when I entered politics.”

Them: Well the rich always get what they want.  The truth is most people can’t afford it anyway, so your system basically only caters to the rich, so it’s greedy and evil.

Me: I tend to disagree – since I am a U.S. citizen with U.S. health insurance, were I to need the same surgery from the same doctor in Florida, I could get it and pay only a token amount for a surgery which I’m sure costs over a hundred thousand dollars.

Them: Well you’re a rich bastard too.  What about all the people who are uninsured?

Me: You mean the ones who spend their money on big screen TVs, beer, and smokes?  Look, it’s true that some Americans legitimately can’t afford health care and that is a shame.  For children, seniors, and the poor, we’ve had Medicaid for years and years now.  There are a lot of Americans who don’t have insurance by choice, but that’s another argument.  Let me propose a hypothetical for you.

Them: Okay.

Me: You’re living paycheck to paycheck and you need heart valve surgery.  This is going to cost you $100,000 which you do not have.  You have two choices: go into enormous, crushing debt from which you can’t escape unless you declare bankruptcy, or forego the surgery and die.  Which do you choose?

Them: That’s an unfair hypothetical.  In Canada you get the surgery and don’t go bankrupt.  You don’t have to choose.

Me: Danny Williams, Premier or Newfoundland and Labrador, would beg to differ, but my point remains.  For all the whining about going into huge debt thanks to expensive (but typically world-best) health care, at least you’re alive.  Is money worth dying for?

Them: The life expectancy is higher in Canada.

Me: Yes, and it’s higher in England and France and a lot of other countries too, for a lot of reasons.  First, there’s the so-called infant mortality rate.  In most countries, babies that are born under certain conditions (e.g. very immature, stillborn, etc.) are not reported as infant deaths, whereas in the United States they are.  The U.S. has an inflated infant mortality rate as such, and as you know from statistics, a few zeroes in an average really add up.  Averaging in deaths at age 0 into the total death rate causes the life expectancy to drop.  So do our car accidents and our murders, neither of which are related to health care.

Them: You’re hand waving!

Me: British MEP Daniel Hannan, when discussing the National Health Service, pointed out a very interesting fact which is worth repeating since it suredly applies to Canada as well.  “The statistic you need to look at,” he said, “is your life expectancy from the moment you are diagnosed with an illness such as cancer, where the United States soundly beats every other country, particularly those with socialized medicine.  You are likely to live nearly 10 times longer as an American with cancer than as a Briton with cancer.  That’s a poignant figure.”

Them: … American health care is evil!

Me:  I’d rather live with the sinners than die with the saints.

QED.

Speaking of Justin Bieber’s bodyguard:

Hey Bieb, if you’re so concerned about the health of the world, and you’re so filthy stinking rich from your music, why on earth would you let someone who works for you (although suredly he is hired through some kind of bodyguard agency) go through life without health insurance?  You have the financial means to offer insurance as part of the benefits package for your staff.  Or didn’t you think of that?