Do you think young people should get better care or be prioritized in hospitals? For example, let’s say there is a 20 year old and a 75 year old who both have COVID and are in need of a ventilator. But there is only one left. Who would you give it to?

Abrum Alexander

Great question. The easy answer, of course, is to give it to the 20-year-old, since s/he has
more years of productive life left, which can be extracted and sacrificed to our corporate
overlords. But consider this: Perhaps the 75-year-old is a CEO, or sits on the board of a
major company. In that case, he or she is probably capable of stoking capitalism’s engine room
with hundreds or even thousands of lives.

So it’s not as simple as it appears. I also have to consider whether the 20-year-old
might notice I’m carrying a ventilator and physically wrestle it from me before I can apply its
life-giving grace to the shriveled husk of the 75-year-old Chevron board member who’s
spent his/her life trading away the planet’s climate for profit. I mean,
it’s unlikely, since this 20-year-old needs a ventilator. I can probably fight off someone who
can’t breathe properly. But it would be truly humiliating if I failed, and
had the ventilator ripped from my hands, under the watery, yellowing eyes of a corporate
titan.

Of course, these are the kinds of tough decisions our brave front-line medical workers have to
make all the time. Let me tell you, I don’t envy the doctor who has to decide whether a sick
patient has enough economic potential to justify the patent-inflated cost of a
life-saving medicine. That must be hell. But I suppose you don’t get into that field
unless you’re willing to look a patient in the eye and judge their net worth.

Bottom-line, I just hope that one day we have technology to free us from this kind of
heart-wrenching dilemma. I imagine a future in which patients can submit their
economic potential statements over the internet, thereby saving them an expensive and time-consuming
trip to a hospital in the event that the algorithm calculates they represent a negative cost-benefit
healthcare scenario. I know what you’re thinking: “But Max, the time and financial hit
to economically unproductive citizens is of no consequence. If anything, it’s mildly
stimulating to the transport sector.” Still, I like to hope that one day things might be
different. Not soon, obviously. Not if it will cost us anything. But let’s keep hoping.