Natasha Richardson should have gone to Aspen

Cory Franklin writing in the New York Post makes a persuasive case that if Natasha Richardson had hit her head and suffered epidural hematoma in the U.S. instead of Canada, say at a Colorado ski resort that happened to be the same distance from Denver as the Mount Tremblant ski resort is from Montreal, she would have survived. The reason for this, he says, is that small U.S. hospitals, unlike their counterparts in Canada, have CAT scan machines and other capabilities that could have diagnosed and treated the life-threatening arterial bleeding on Richardson’s brain several hours sooner than happened in Canada. Also, Colorado has helicopters for emergency trips to distant hospitals, which Canada lacks. In Canada, it was six hours from the time of Richardson’s fall before she arrived at a medical facility that could have diagnosed and treated her, and by that time the brain damage was already fatal. In Colorado, she would have been in a Denver hospital receiving diagnosis and treatment in under an hour.

Canadian media outlets and blogs had better not publish Franklin’s article, however, as they will probably be charged with inciting hate and discrimination against Canada’s National Health Service. It is, after all, a criminal offense in Canada to stir up hatred against a religion.

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Sage McLaughlin writes:

When I first saw the story on Richardson, my very first thought was, “Why did they fly her to an American hospital from where she was? Don’t they have, like, excellent and free health care in Canada?” But I thought it was too mean-spirited to actually write down—she was still in critical condition at the time.

At the end of the day, though, leftists like Obama actually do believe that it would be better that such unnecessary death occur, simply because socialized medicine seems more just to them. Whether it actually makes people better off on the whole, is a tertiary distraction. (Witness Obama’s response when it was pointed out to him that some element of his tax scheme would actually reduce government revenues—he said he’d still go forward because of concerns about fairness. Left-wing concern for equality is actually a matter of punitive justice, and always has been.)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 27, 2009 08:27 AM | Send