August 14, 2009
The Truth: At some point, we will have to pull the plug on grandma.
Obamacare will lead to rationing and those most likely on to be hit will be the elderly:
Elderly Americans are turning out in droves to fight ObamaCare, and President Obama is arguing back that they have nothing to worry about. Allow us to referee. While claims about euthanasia and “death panels” are over the top, senior fears have exposed a fundamental truth about what Mr. Obama is proposing: Namely, once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, rationing care is inevitable, and those who have lived the longest will find their care the most restricted.
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Far from being a scare tactic, this is a logical conclusion based on experience and common-sense. Once health care is a “free good” that government pays for, demand will soar and government costs will soar too. When the public finally reaches its taxing limit, something will have to give on the care and spending side. In a word, care will be rationed by politics.
Mr. Obama’s reply is that private insurance companies already ration, by deciding which treatments are covered and which aren’t. However, there’s an ocean of difference between coverage decisions made under millions of voluntary private contracts and rationing via government. An Atlantic Ocean, in fact. Virtually every European government with “universal” health care restricts access in one way or another to control costs, and it isn’t pretty.
The article concludes:
It’s striking that even the AARP—which is run by liberals who favor national health care—has been backing away from support for Mr. Obama’s version. The AARP leadership’s Democratic sympathies will probably prevail in the end, perhaps after some price-control sweeteners are added for prescription drugs. But AARP is out of touch with its own members, who have figured out that their own health and lives are at stake in this debate over ObamaCare. They know that when medical discretion clashes with limited government budgets, medicine loses.
The bottom line is, Obama can argue all he wants about what the bill says and means, but when you look at the implications for what this bill will eventually lead to down the road it is undeniable that care rationing will hurt the elderly more than any other population. When rationing happens, which it inevitably will, someone will have to start making decisions, developing formulas, to decided what care will be allowed and what care will be cut and who is deserving of care and who is not.
If a person is 80 years old, do you really think that they will be treated the same as a 24-year-old? Nope. They will be viewed as someone who has already lived their life and doesn’t have much time left no matter what you do for them. Their care will be rationed, first. That’s just the facts. That may not be the bill’s intent, but it will be the bill’s end result. There is no way to prevent that. And, by the time we reach that point, all of the people who voted for it will probably be dead (most of those pols are pretty effing old!) and the ones living won’t care because they’ll still be clinging to their own health care system.
(H/T: Memeorandum)
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Though you indicate that death panels and the like are extreme, the scare of rationing that you mention is also towards the far end of the spectrum. While any real system must introduce rationing or have uncontrollable costs, the selection of who does and does not receive treatment is not nearly as simplistic as your make it out to be. It is also not nearly as restricting as you suggest. In many European countries and in Canada, extremely ill seniors are frequently kept alive at the request of their families despite their own requests to be taken off of life support. In other words, no politician is sitting at the ventilator switch ready to flip it off at a moments notice just to save a few bucks.
In the US, 17% of GDP is spent on health care as compared to approximately 10% in other OECD countries without any real difference in the quality of treatment. The real difference among countries is that people in the US are at the mercy of insurance providers and complex insurance policies that they may not fully understand. Having your access to healthcare bound up in a legal contract that most people won’t have the capacity to fully grasp is far more damaging than the supposed loss of freedoms or rationing that a public system could theoretically introduce.
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