Would health care reform have saved Deamonte Driver’s life?

I’ve been wrestling with how to approach this post for two days because it’s a sensitive topic involving the death of a child and I feel uncomfortable demagoging when dead children are the topic of discussion. But I can’t get Freddie’s post over at the League on Deamonte Driver out of my mind, so here goes.

Freddie links to the story of Deamonte who, long story short, died of an infection in his brain caused by an untreated cavity. He then used that story to rather unfairly bludgeon Megan McArdle as a heartless monster who doesn’t care if poor, sick children die. Writes Freddie:

Megan has said, now, explicitly and without reservation, that she doesn’t think the citizens of the country with the most powerful economy in the history of the world should be guaranteed health care. She is, in fact, certain that providing that health care to those who desperately need it on the government dime is immoral. (Read the post.) And she’s not afraid to say it.

As I said, I think this is a little unfair. This is what Megan wrote*:

I don’t want this bill, and I don’t want any other bill that increases the number of people for whom the government pays for care.

This is a key distinction because here’s the really interesting thing: Deamonte Driver was covered by Medicaid, a federally funded health care program (read the story). And he still died. Expanding the scope of government care, in this case at least, kind of begs the question because it was the failure of a federal health care program that led to his death.

And that’s why I keep coming back to Freddie’s post, and what drives me a little nuts about it. David Frum does a good job of demonstrating how parental neglect — and not a lack of access to health care — is the reason why Deamonte died. There’s no universal health care system in the entire world that will fix terrible parenting. Absent a system in which we grant the government not only the power to provide everyone health care at any hospital they want for no money whatsoever combined with a system that makes it a criminal offense to not get your children checked up on a routine basis, there’s nothing that could have been done to save Deamonte.

Look, I understand that it’s easy to whip up emotion by trotting out a dead kid and using that to play off our natural human sympathy, but that doesn’t make it a good argument.

*Earlier in the post she writes “I was writing about my deeper opposition to the entire project of providing, paying for, or otherwise guaranteeing health care. … the main thing is that I don’t want to give the government a greater role in health care markets.” I suppose you could read that as Freddie did and think it’s callous, but nowhere in the post does she call for an end to Medicaid or Medicare or to throw the poor out of hospitals and into the street where they will suffer mightily before they die.