It’s not often we get to see a smaller story that so perfectly crystalizes a large social problem but this one out of Arizona sums up America’s woes very well:

Late last month, Mark Price, an Arizona father who had been battling leukemia for a year, died due to complications related to chemotherapy treatment he was receiving. Price had been awaiting a bone marrow transplant, but the state’s Medicaid program — Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) — had denied his application due to cuts to funding for transplant programs championed by Gov. Jan Brewer (R) and fellow Republicans. At the last minute, an anonymous donor came forward and offered to pay the $250,000 for the procedure, but by then it was too late.

Defending the decision to deny AHCCCS the money to pay for Price’s transplant, Brewer said that the “bottom line is that the state only has so much money and we can only provide so many optional kinds of care, and those are one of the options that we had to take” — implying that saving Price’s life was “optional.”

This is actually the second death as a result of Brewer’s cruelty:

Now, the University of Arizona Medical Center has told the press that another patient passed away in late December because they were unable to get their organ transplant funded. Although the attending physicians declined to release the name of the patient out of respect for the family’s privacy, they confirmed that the patient that passed away was one of the 98 Arizonans cut off from organ transplants by Brewer and the GOP-controlled state legislature. He “was our patient. He was on our list,” said surgery department spokeswoman Jo Marie Gellerman.

By completely removing the funding for organ transplants, monstrous sadist Brewer has created a perverse form of serial murder, where she gets to watch 98 innocent people die, one by one, and suffer no legal consequences. She’s the John Wayne Gacy of gubernatorial politics, only nobody’s talking about putting her in prison for two murders to date, and 96 more to come.

And here’s the rub that transforms this sociopathic, cold-blooded sadism from a bizarre and horrific sideshow in Arizona, state of the damned, into a window on all that’s wrong with American society. Not only is this monstrous, and cruel, and evil, but it’s also precisely, absolutely the wrong policy on amoral, technocratic grounds too, which has brought out some of the last sane or principled elements in the Republican party, believe it or not:

After learning about the plight of the 98 Arizonan patients, Steven Daglas, an Illinois State GOP Central Committeeman, worked with several others to analyze the Arizona state budget and finances to develop funding solutions that would allow the state to fully fund the transplants for all of the remaining patients without actually raising any new revenue. The possible solutions included using $2 million from an AIG settlement that the state of Arizona will receive or “transferring $1.2 million in funds that Arizona once planned to use to build bridges for endangered squirrels.” Yet even after repeatedly sending his proposal to Brewer since December, Daglas has received zero response from the governor. He told The Arizona Republic that she may be ignoring his proposal out of the fear that he’s trying to politically damage her, but he explained, “I’m a Republican guy from Illinois…We’re just concerned about these transplant patients and want to help“:

…

As Arizona98.com notes, “The fact our mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters (hard-working citizens and good people) have been deemed expendable at a price of $13,877.56 per human life still does not make sense.”

Update
“I refuse to believe that any person or state will spend $1.25 million to save 5 squirrels a year, but not 98 human beings. It can’t be true. That just doesn’t make any sense,” Daglas told ThinkProgress.

Of course it is true, unfortunately. I’m all in favor of bridges to help wildlife cross roads, so the demagoguing on the basic idea of a wildlife crossing bridge is also unfortunate. More to the point though, look what we’re talking about in terms of raw economics. Under 14k to save a human life.

Think about that for a moment. Arizona has decided that it won’t spend 14k to save a human life. How much, in a cold, detached, purely capitalistic sense, is a human life worth?

Well, there’s considerable disagreement on that point, but it’s definitely far more than 14k a year. For example, GDP per capita in the United States, even during this awful downturn, is about $45,000. It absolutely and completely makes perfect economic sense, from a Scrooge-esque point of view, to spend 14k to ensure that you continue to get, on average, 45k pumped back into society. That’s a 300% return on your investment, assuming that the person only lives one additional year! Of course, many transplant patients will live far longer than that.

This is where America’s insanity becomes manifest. Not only are we cruel, monstrous, and inhumanly sociopathic, we’re also incredibly, inexplicably stupid and self-destructive. Evil is one thing; self-injurious evil is another. America isn’t just crazy, it seems full to the brim with self-loathing, slashing at its wrists even as it tries to destroy anyone and everyone around it in the global community.

It should go without saying that this strategy does not have great long-term prospects. America will be brought down, not by the might of an ideological adversary like the Soviet Union, or by the nebulous forces of international terrorism, nor even by its own blackened heart, but by our short-sighted stupidity.

In Mel Brooks satire ‘Spaceballs’ perhaps the best line comes from Dark Helmet, speaking on the nature of Good and Evil:

Dark Helmet: So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb.

Of course, what Helmet failed to see is that evil can, in fact, be even dumber, self-destructive as well as ruthless, and thus lead to its own destruction. So it is with Arizona, and America, in the early 21st century.