Second Thoughts

Malcolm Gladwell's perspective wasn't always in criticism of universal health care; in the year 2000 he and Adam Gopnik (who has lived in Canada) had a public debate where he argued, as a Canadian let down by his country's health care system, against it. The transcript for that debate can be read here, and it is very intelligent. Gopnik makes the point, for example, that when he was living in France and his son was extremely ill with food poisoning, "The overriding fact was that when we arrived--and I have arrived in emergency wards in America with sick children, and you spend half an hour figuring out who is going to pay and how this sick child will be paid for--when we arrived at the emergency ward in Paris with a sick child, who would pay for this sick child's illness was simply not a question that anyone raised.. In other words, money is secondary to the simple idea that somebody needs medical attention." This idea seems less true in our system.