Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 12, 1993 TAG: 9301120397
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
BREAKING THE LAW TO HEAL A FRIEND
NO QUESTION, what Benny Milligan and James McElveen did was illegal. Which may go to prove that justice and the law aren't always the same.According to the wire story, McElveen, 32, is a painter and mechanic who worked for a small New Orleans-area business. Its employees, like 37 million other Americans, aren't covered by health insurance. Milligan, McElveen's friend from childhood, worked for a NASA contractor and so had government-paid insurance.
Two years ago, the friends were vacationing in Tennessee when McElveen fell 30 feet from a waterfall and broke his back.
By law, hospitals must stabilize all patients in danger of dying. They are not required to treat medically indigent patients beyond that. Many do, but there was no guarantee McElveen could get the surgery that doctors said he needed to avoid paralysis.
Milligan switched identities with the unconscious McElveen. McElveen was treated, transferred to another hospital, the operation was performed - all paid for by Milligan's insurance. Nothing was said later, until someone else snitched. Now, McEleveen and Milligan are in federal prison, and Milligan's wife under home confinement, for defrauding the government.
In some ways, this is the stuff of case studies for ethics courses and Sunday school classes. When is it right to break the law? Under what circumstances? To save the life, or at least restore the health, of a friend? Of someone who isn't a friend?
Perhaps the rules of peaceful civil-disobedience are relevant - the ones about how, if you break an unjust law, you also should be willing to accept the consequences of breaking it. Under this model, the actions might have been morally acceptable if, once McElveen's recovery was assured, the men had 'fessed up.
Or maybe those rules aren't relevant. It wasn't exactly the law against insurance fraud the friends were in effect protesting; it was, rather, the failures of a health-care financing system to which an otherwise reasonable and just law was applied. And they weren't exactly protesting; they were trying to assure medical treatment that might otherwise be denied and almost certainly would be unaffordable for the patient.
But all this is from the perspective of individuals who happen to get caught up in a dilemma. Let's look at it from society's perspective.
There are dangers in the notion of societal morality. On both the left and right (and, for that matter, points in between), the turning of sociopolitical issues into moral crusades too often camouflages lack of solid analysis, too often serves as an excuse for shrill intolerance or evasion of individual responsibility.
Still, to lament the abuse of moral thinking in public policy is not to deny its importance.
Without presuming to declare one or another possible solution the obvious or only morally correct one, it still might be said that America's inability (so far) to find a way to ensure a reasonable standard of health care for all its people carries an element of moral failure. It might be said, too, that a system tolerant of keeping a potentially productive worker disabled - or, to extend the point a bit, keeping unborn babies malnourished and young children in poverty - is so economically obtuse as to suggest moral obtuseness as well.
The courts at least understood that McElveen and Milligan aren't mad-dog killers, to be locked up in isolation for life. Still, McElveen and Milligan are to serve a few months in a minimum-security prison not far from their homes, where they presumably can ponder the morality of their actions.
So should we all.