In 2016, Charles Manson, then serving a life sentence for murdering or conspiring to murder seven people, developed a lesion on his large intestine, or possibly his colon or anus, that caused internal bleeding. The authorities, concluding that this was more than California’s Corcoran State Prison infirmary could handle, sent Manson to a private hospital in Bakersfield.

That posed no small expense to California taxpayers. Multiple uniformed state police were necessary to guard the serial killer. Manson was examined by multiple doctors, who performed a variety of tests, persuaded a reluctant Manson to undergo surgery, then changed their minds during pre-op—and not because they suddenly realized they were treating an unrepentant monster with a swastika carved onto his brow. They didn’t say, as you or I would be tempted to: “Let that son of a bitch die.” Rather, they rendered the professional judgment that Manson, then 82, was in sufficiently weak physical condition to pose an unacceptable risk of dying on the operating table. Manson died the following year after a second hospitalization.

Human beings don’t come more despicable than Manson. Yet the state of California granted him health care, free of charge. It’s something that a civilized society is called upon to do for its very worst people. Michael Moore made the same point with a comic flourish in his 2007 documentary, Sicko. Moore loaded up three boats in Miami with uninsured Americans and took them to Guantánamo Bay, where, at a detention camp situated inside America’s Navy base, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other........

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