Hospital Stays

Charles Krauthammer has it half-right in his Feb. 16 Column Right: It is unfair that mastectomy patients should benefit from government regulations preventing their being kicked out of hospitals too soon at the bidding of insurance companies, while patients suffering similar traumas enjoy no such protection.

He’s predictably wrong, however, when he argues that these mastectomy patients should join other patients in undergoing assembly-line treatment in the name of the insurance companies’ quest for the almighty dollar. It’s time we agreed that there are some things where the profit motive simply does not belong, and essential health care is foremost among them. Why should mastectomy patients, mothers who have just given birth, or Krauthammer’s burn victims, amputees and colostomy patients receive care that’s curtailed just so some CEOs and stockholders can make more money?

CHRISTOPHER WILHELM

Los Angeles