We learn the story from a steamer tramp, who tells Dagny the story as he eats with her in her dining car. As he tells the story, everyone started keeping tabs on everyone else, because the harder you worked, the harder you had to work, and the more you needed, the harder others had to work. Near the end, he tells of an old woman in their community that was beloved by the people at the factory, the elderly mother of one of the workers. She fell, and was going to need a costly operation (to be shared by everyone, of course) and the tramp tells Dagny that a couple nights before the surgery, she mysteriously died.
In short, someone killed the kindly old woman because they got tired of having to pay for other people's problems. You have a microscript for what national healthcare and the monsters who are trying to force it down our throats have in mind. Literally. Also from NRO:
Word to the wise: Short your shares in Grandma, Inc. That’s because Dr. Emanuel has embraced a technique for simplifying some of the tough calls: age discrimination. He wrote in The Lancet in 2008: “Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination.” We all were young once, the argument goes, so denying the elderly and weak in order to care for the young and fit is just. It does not take the fine nose of a Robert Parker to detect a whiff of Social Darwinism in ideas of this vintage. It is morally shallow, but unsurprising: Age discrimination is not a side effect of politically managed health care; it is a critical and fundamental feature of Britain’s National Health Service and other government-run health systems admired by Obama and his advisers. Under their arithmetic, the rewards of a procedure must be divided by the remaining life expectancy of the patient, leaving the elderly with what McCaughey calls a “denominator problem.”
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