Guardian joins Joan Walsh, plays race card on Ebola care, Texas blunder

Texas Ebola cases expose troubling contrasts and spark fears of race divide

Universal coverage is something Obamacare did not actually achieve.

There is no standing commitment from any level of government to reimburse hospital or care-giver costs for treating the indigent on a par with the insured, and so they don't.

What Medicaid actually covers varies state by state, and in some states it's pitiful.

Given that ordinarily no insurance covers experimental drugs, therapies, or treatments, it's an interesting question who will get ZMapp, if it becomes available again, and how it will be financed.

Ditto any experimental serums, vaccines, or drugs.

Ditto the transfusion therapy that seems to have some merit.

I suspect in law and in budgeting there is and will be money as needed for isolation and quarantine of the sick, as a public health measure to protect other people.

That's not the same as money to ensure all the afflicted, including the uninsured and the under-insured, get top flight treatment whose aims may range from palliative care to improving chances of survival.

If a vaccine becomes available, which rubric does it fall under?

Too, it's not prudent for a vaccine to be used unless the chance of getting the disease if you take the vaccine is less than the chance of getting it if you don't.

That is always true if it's a killed virus vaccine and in any degree effective.

Not so if it's a live virus vaccine.

If it's a live virus vaccine of modest effectiveness it might make sense for people living or working in West Africa to get it and no sense at all for people outside Africa, except perhaps some care givers.

And in that same case it would make good sense for the wealthier nations to supply the vaccine to the West Africans, to help eliminate the problem at the source.

The race card will be played against that strategy all the same by people who find it politically advantageous or emotionally satisfying.

If it's a highly effective, killed virus vaccine the temptation will be to give it to ourselves first, and then skimp on what is sent to Africa or elsewhere, the practical incentives for doing so reducing to altruism supplemented by concern about indirect economic loss here due to disaster in Africa.

In that case, the race card will be played with great fury if white people even indicate they are thinking of such a strategy, probably accompanied by violence encouraged, as usual, by the left.

Including The Guardian.

[Aside:

Will there be rationing, and will it incorporate the latest and most approved PC ideas of who has a worthwhile life and who does not, as well as who deserves care and who does not?

Can't help recalling that fellow who used to work for the administration who urged death at 75.

Hmm.

/Aside]