Critical Care

That’s the name of a Star Trek: Voyager episode first aired November 1, 2000, right before the election.

It was recently rerun on Spike TV and it’s quite interesting in this day and age.

The Doctor’s Holographic Emitter that allows him to interact outside the sickbay or holodeck is stolen and sold to the administrator of an alien hospital. The Doctor is activated on Level Red, a dark, crowded level with many patients and few doctors. Many of these patients are dying for want of medication, but The Allocator – a computer program that decides who gets what – found that the Red Patient’s TC (treatment coefficient) was too low.

The Doctor did what he could for the patients on Level Red, so well that The Allocator reassigned him to Level Blue, where the TC per patient was much higher (Government workers vs laborers) and the doctor/patient ratio was one to one. These patients were more valuable don’t you know.

The Level Blue patients were being given a medication to slow arterial aging. Totally unnecessary to their health, was just supposed to help extend the life of the Level Blue patient. Kind of like a Botox injection for purely cosmetic reasons versus a Botox injection that would kill a tumor and save a life. Only there’s only so many injections and The Allocator has decided that the Level Blue people are more worthy than the Level Red people.

Of course the Doctor steals some of the medication from Level Blue and brings it to Level Red to treat the patients there and the hospital administrator comes down to chew him out. The doctor infects the Administrator with the disease so as to blackmail him into getting medication for those who really need it on Level Red.

This is where we are headed people. Because the government won’t be able to fund full health care for everyone, the government will have to find its own version of “The Allocator” that will use some kind of extremely complicated formula to determine who gets the necessary surgeries and who gets to take an aspirin, who gets medication and who will just have to do without.