Being a classic “Good-Time-Charlie” had taken a toll on his old ticker. With the best health insurance in the world, the docs managed to keep that ticker going a couple of decades longer than its due for replacement date. Giving Charlie a full decade as a devoted anti-communist warrior and public servant. The collapse of the USSR and and 1992 final defeat of communists in Afghanistan were the culmination of some of Charlie's efforts.
He could retire in 1996 satisfied that the world was a safer place. Thanks to people like him. Also to cash in a bit primarily as a $360,000/year lobbyist for Pakistan. For eight years. The ticker was slowing down and taking Charlie with it.
He was placed on a heart transplant waiting list in July 2007. At age seventy-four. Charlie got real lucky again. Two months later a heart less than half his age was found to be just right for him. There were no thirty, forty, or fifty-year-olds on that waiting list that were suitable for that thirty-five year old heart. Or perhaps Charlie had the best health insurance and the means to cover the co-pays and continuing drug and treatment costs.
Whatever. Charlie got a new heart. That new heart kept Charlie alive for twenty-nine months. Maybe the heart wasn't good enough. Or Charlie was too old and unhealthy to be a decent recipient. We only know that in the “land of the best health care in the world,” denying the Charlie Wilson's a new heart, even if it's on the government's dime, would be medical care rationing based on science instead of the preferred method of rationing based on money