If you doubt that ever-expanding government control over medicine hurts people, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is eager to disabuse you. How else to explain his new requirement that city-controlled emergency rooms restrict supplies of painkillers in the name of the war on drugs?
The idea is that if emergency rooms shrink supplies below what medical practitioners think reasonable, then it’s harder for addicts to get their fix.
Have personnel known that certain patients were addicted to painkillers and treated them with painkillers anyway? Or are painkiller addicts stealing the supplies? Whatever the rationalizations, it’s evident that substandard supplies will make it harder to help non-addicts in serious pain.
What about days when demand is especially high? Or when delivery of new supplies is disrupted?
Like any central planner confident in his own omniscience, Bloomberg is sure that limiting the supply of painkillers below the level judged adequate by hospitals could never make it harder to help persons in pain. He also says, if so, so what? “[So] you didn’t get enough painkillers and you did have to suffer a little bit. . . . There’s nothing that you can possibly do where somebody isn’t going to suffer. . . .”
His rationale, here, would “justify” making it harder to obtain anything whatever that enhances our lives if that thing might also be used destructively. A counsel to impair life in the name of saving it.
Bloomberg adds callousness to his hubris, topping it off with absurdity.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.