We killed her.

Here's the question: is the fact that she violated her visa enough justification for the fact that Ama Sumani is now dead?

We pay taxes into the NHS to insure the general population against the cost of health care, so that it is free at the point of use (I watched Sicko earlier this week, and struggled to believe such an innocuous premise was so controverisal in America). Ama violated her student visa by working (immigrants are net contributors to this economy but that, apparenlty, no longer is enough). She got ill while she was living in Cardiff - you could, even if you were so inclined to use such a hateful term, accuse her of being a "health tourist".

And to all those who think we need to treat "our own" first, answer me this: where have the resources saved from not treating Ama gone? She wasn't taking up an operating theatre which was needed to save the life of a British car crash victim, or a bed while other cancer patients were being turned away. She needed drugs and she needed dialysis (She actually needed a bone marrow transplant, but we were never going to do that). We're not running short of drugs, and I don't believe people are dying waiting for dialysis. And even if resources were a lot tighter that I've made out here, what the cost of her treatment relative to the waste of money from IT upgrades and new PFI hospitals?

Not that you need a financial argument, when a moral one would suffice - we are a wealthy and prosperous country who were in the position to help an ill woman, and instead decided to shun her, because legally, we should never had even heard of her. She should have got this disease and died in Africa. She shouldn't have been here. She should have been in Africa. We would never have had to worry, if she'd just been in Africa. But she was here. And she shouldn't have been. She should have been in Africa.

It seems so ridiculous that we are often quite generous in giving to charity for general aid to the inhabitants of developing countries, but so cold about helping an individual case where we can actually see the good it would do - and the harm it has done when we failed.