There is much discussion, and considerable trepidation, concerning what reforming our health care system will produce, and what role bureaucrats might have in the allocation of resources to individual patients. That’s a wordy way to say it. The simple way: People have questions about rationing medical care.
Rationing is the process of allocating scarce resources which are insufficient to fully satisfy existing demand for the resources. Rationing is when the average family of four needs 140 gallons of gasoline each month to go about their business as usual, but some authority limits them to 110 gallons per month. That’s easy to understand.
In the realm of the delivery of medical care, rationing can be harder to detect. A physician might silently opt not to order a test because he knows there is only a very slight chance that the order would be approved by the insurance company, or by a medicare administrator. An insurance company might refuse to authorize a procedure because they stall classify it as an experimental therapy. Are those cases of rationing? I believe you could make a case that they are, but Michael Kinsley has a simpler way to look at it in this column:
Here is a handy-dandy way to determine whether the failure to order some exam or treatment constitutes rationing: If the patient were the president, would he get it? If he’d get it and you wouldn’t, it’s rationing.
The massive energy tax couched as a climate bill, most often called Cap and Trade, is only the latest incarnation of liberal genius applied to energy policy. Remember it was Pres. Jimmy Carter (D) who championed the creation of the U.S. Department of Energy, which was accomplished during his first year in office. (Quick: Name three stellar accomplishments of the Dept. of Energy. Yeah, I can’t either…) Now we have Pres. Obama pushing for a massive additional layer of bureaucracy for energy policy, accompanied by new taxes which will, by Obama’s own admission during his campaign, lead to greatly increased costs to American families for electricity and fuels.
As you think about whether this legislation will accomplish its stated goals, keep the two headlines in this article in mind.
So, I read this article, learn that intelligence suggests that N. Korea is planning to launch a ballistic missile over Japan and toward Hawaii in the next few weeks, and then have to wonder. Remind me again why President Obama cancelled much of the U.S. missile defense program? Was it because he just needed the [...]
The press in the U.S. has long been referred to as the fourth branch of government, meaning that although without any vested powers constitutionally (other than freedom) it carried a duty to provide a check on government’s power and actions by examining and reporting to the citizenry just what government was seeking and doing in [...]
It’s finally official: GM is going to file for bankruptcy, providing protection from creditors as the company seeks to reorganize. Why didn’t we (by “we” I mean the boneheads in Washington) allow this to happen in the final quarter of 2008, when every thinking person could see that it was both inevitable and the only [...]
