CBS 60 minutes has an amazing story about a patient given a $1 million heart transplant at Stanford–who was a prisoner.  The decision to pay for the transplant was made by the state prison system because it feared being sued by the patient’s estate. Too many lawyers? Apparently it’s part of the 8th Amendment. Has the prisoner got the same rights as anyone else or more?  Would an uninsured patient get the same care? Unlikely, according to Dr. Lawrence Schneiderman, a medical ethicist at the University of California at San Diego, interviewed in the show, you may need to show that you have $150,000 in cash if you don’t have insurance. And the prisoner in question? He wasn’t a model patients and died shortly after the transplant. You can make up your own mind about this one, but it brings up all kinds of issues, and goes to show that health care is incredibly complex.