Contrary to Dr. David Schneider’s claims in an otherwise excellent panel at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Princess Diana was not killed by socialized medicine.
A number of factors were to blame for her death, but the French healthcare system was one of her best chances for survival. Urban legend likes to blame the shameless pursuit of the paparazzi, the hard-partying Dodi Fayed, or even Kensington Palace. But the cause of Diana’s death is actually quite simple: Driver Henri Paul went behind the wheel with three times the legal limit of alcohol in his blood, along with prescription drugs. He drove the car at more than twice the speed limit. And her bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, failed to ensure the princess was wearing her seat belt.
By the time French emergency medical services arrived at the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, the site of the car crash, Princess Diana’s heart rate was already weak and rapid. Unlike the English or American healthcare systems, the French believe in stabilizing patients at the site of emergencies, meaning that ambulances there are staffed by at least one physician, not just emergency medical technicians. Their ambulances are also equipped with cardiac resuscitation tools considered far superior to that of many English-speaking healthcare systems. Seeing as how Diana’s heart repeatedly failed at the scene of the crash, the French system was likely necessary just to get her to the hospital alive.
Given the multiple stops needed to resuscitate her and the extraordinarily slow path to the hospital, lest they hit a bump and stop her heart again, Princess Diana didn’t make it to the superior Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital until nearly two hours after the crash. Physicians across the globe concur that Diana’s injuries, including multiple vital blood vessel tears and the total displacement of her heart within her chest, were likely insurmountable given the circumstances. But given her critically low blood pressure and heart failure, it’s hard to imagine any other emergency medical system doing a better job getting her to the hospital alive. As Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld told Tina Brown for her biography of Diana, “she might have been saved only if the seventy-mile-an-hour crash had been straight into an operating room.”
Socialized medicine might indeed prevent the research and development of drugs that save millions. It might cause agonizing and long wait times for appointments, referrals, and desperately needed procedures. But it’s not to blame for Princess Diana’s death.
