THE DAILY BLADE: Nationalized Healthcare Always Leads To Rationing
Americans who remember the 1973 and 1979 oil crises – being allowed to buy gas on alternate days, depending upon whether their license plate ended with an odd or even number, and waiting an hour or more in a line that stretched several blocks until getting to the pump – understand healthcare rationing all too well.
They also know that conservation and increased fuel efficiency did little to mitigate gas shortages in 2004 and 2008 – caused in part by government meddling in the free market - nor to slow down the rate of growth in the price of domestic crude oil, which has nearly doubled between 1973 and 2009 (and briefly quadrupled in 2008).
It’s not the U.S. Postal Service or its private competitors that President Barack Hussein Obama should be looking to when contemplating healthcare “reform,” but the oil industry.
Libertarian columnist John Stossel writes “Obama's nationalization scheme … is based on magical thinking that ignores the laws of supply and demand: “Medical care doesn't grow on trees. It must be produced by human and physical capital, and those resources are limited.”
Put another way: If you want to go to the top of the Empire State Building and there are 100 tourists ahead of you in line, you’ll get on one of the elevators to the 102nd Floor Observatory in a few minutes. If there are 5,000 tourists ahead of you, your wait will be several hours.
Same thing with healthcare. If Obama wants to extend insurance coverage to the 47 million people who are now uninsured – going so far as to require them to obtain coverage – then these newly insured people will make appointments to see primary care physicians and specialists, and to get the diagnostic tests these doctors order. There are just so many doctors, specialists and technicians to go around, so their appointment calendars will be booked solid for months into the future.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed David Gratzer, a Canadian-born physician and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute who “once believed that government health care is compassionate and equitable” but changed his mind in medical school writes: “Canadians wait for practically any procedure or diagnostic test or specialist consultation in the public system. … To limit the growth in health spending, governments restrict the supply of health care by rationing it through waiting.”
Which brings us to Stossel’s next point about rationing: “Costs are real. If they are incurred, someone has to pay them. … As the government's health care budget becomes strained, as it must - and, as Obama admits, already is under Medicare - the government will have to cut back on what it lets people have.” Hence, the proposed $500 billion cut to Medicare.
In a recent editorial The Wall Street Journal explained the U.K.’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) rations to limit growth in healthcare spending because of the paltry cost savings realized by automating health records and eliminating waste:
The British officials who established NICE in the late 1990s pitched it as a body that would ensure that the government-run National Health System used "best practices" in medicine. …
What NICE has become in practice is a rationing board. As health costs have exploded in Britain as in most developed countries, NICE has become the heavy that reduces spending by limiting the treatments that 61 million citizens are allowed to receive through the NHS. …
Mr. Obama and Democrats claim they can expand subsidies for tens of millions of Americans, while saving money and improving the quality of care. It can't possibly be done. The inevitable result of their plan will be some version of a NICE board that will tell millions of Americans that they are too young, or too old, or too sick to be worth paying to care for.
The AARP generation is up in arms about end-of-life-counseling, suspecting that the oldest and sickest amongst us will be coerced into foregoing treatment that will enhance their quality of life or, possibly, extend their lives. Dems insist that neither the House nor Senate versions of healthcare “reform” will force Medicare recipients to go before “death panels” every five years to justify their worthiness to continue to receive medical care.
That’s true insofar as the text of the legislation goes. But columnist Nat Hentoff quotes a warning by Wesley J. Smith, a Senior Fellow in Human Rights and Bioethics at the Discovery Institute, that “[w]hatever bill passes, hundreds of bureaucrats in the federal agencies will have years to promulgate scores of regulations to govern the details of the law”:
This is where the real mischief could be done because most regulatory actions are effectuated beneath the public radar. It is thus essential, as just one example, that any end-of-life counseling provision in the final bill be specified to be purely voluntary … and that the counseling be required by law to be neutral as to outcome. Otherwise, even if the legislation doesn't push in a specific direction - for instance, the government refusing treatment - the regulations could.
As if that’s not frightening enough, though Obama insists that cost-driven healthcare rationing won’t happen in the U.S. (“we won’t pull the plug on grandma”), that’s exactly what our wounded war veterans are subjected to, according to Saint Vincent College president Jim Towey:
Last year, bureaucrats at the VA's National Center for Ethics in Health Care advocated a 52-page end-of-life planning document, "Your Life, Your Choices." …
[A] worksheet on page 21 lists various scenarios and asks users to then decide whether their own life would be "not worth living."
The circumstances listed include ones common among the elderly and disabled: living in a nursing home, being in a wheelchair and not being able to "shake the blues." There is a section which provocatively asks, "Have you ever heard anyone say, 'If I'm a vegetable, pull the plug'?" There also are guilt-inducing scenarios such as "I can no longer contribute to my family's well being," "I am a severe financial burden on my family" and that the vet's situation "causes severe emotional burden for my family."
When the government can steer vulnerable individuals to conclude for themselves that life is not worth living, who needs a death panel? …
This hurry-up-and-die message is clear and unconscionable.
In Christopher Buckley’s novel “Boomsday,” the twentysomething protagonist, Cassandra Devine, comes up with a “modest proposal” to reform Social Security and the tax code, while also paying down the massive national debt: Create a tax break for patriotic boomers to commit suicide at age seventy-five (“voluntary transitioning”). The line between satire and reality has grown uncomfortably thin and our constitutional right to life will inevitably morph into a regulatory obligation to die, if Dems get their way on healthcare “reform.”
Editorial Note: This post was updated to add a link to the VA's "Your Life Your Choices," provided by reader Lemonfemale.
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