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to the point where a woman who has almost drowned tries to refuse an ambulance ride

That phrase "tries to refuse" suggests that they dragged her off in the ambulance anyway, in spite of her protests. Of course this thing is so badly written that that could be wrong, too. But it seems to me that once you've had artificial respiration, and you expel the water from your lungs, and you seem to be making sense and to be OK, then it's really up to you whether you need to go to the hospital for further tests. The odds are high that they'll book you in for the night, let you lie there in bed with nobody watching most of the time, and then release you in the morning with a whopping bill.

Sure, it's nice to get checked out and make sure. But I don't think the state has a right to drag you off and make you pay if you don't want to. I think that if this happened to me, and I felt OK after the experience, I would politely decline to go.

That was my thought too. In fact I might go further and say it was a good demonstration of how the market works. She made a value calculation and decided she didn't need an ambulance. That freed up the ambulance for someone who might have actually needed it. Supply was matched to demand through the price mechanism with no government rationing required. Beautiful.

Naturally to the writer this is almost barbarism, but really this kind of uncoerced coordinated interdependence represents society functioning at a very high level. A mature free market system is incredibly complex and doesn't just spring into place (this is setting aside the question of whether ours is really a free market system anymore, or whether it's functional). Rather it has to evolve into what it is. Sometimes the lefties make the argument "well, if there's something wrong with socialized healthcare, why did we stand up a socialized healthcare system in Iraq?" Well, it's because you can stand up a socialized healthcare system at the drop of a hat. It's fundamentally a much simpler thing.