critical care (2000)

Last night, I watched the Star Trek Voyager episode Critical Care. In it, the Doctor is abducted into a hospital that is undersupplied & understaffed. He immediately gets to work helping the sick and lambasting the inequity of the hospital's coverage. The rich and powerful get top quality care; the poor are given beds to die on. It turns out the hospital's resources are allocated by a computer (the Allocator), which calculates scores for each patient based on a consequentialist rubric. If you're the CEO of a fertilizer factory whose death would result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, you get a high score. If you're a warehouse worker whose death would only show up in your mother's thoughts, you get a pat on the back. The analogue is ambiguous - is the Allocator like private healthcare - humane treatment only for those who can pay? Or is the Allocator like a planned economy - oppressively reductive in its metrification of human worth? The hospital's administrator,…