Dan McLaughlin at CBS News has an excellent opinion/analysis of the current health care “debate”. Here’s a few pastes, but read the whole thing:
Let’s review the options. The Democrats’ main argument is that restructuring the entire health care sector will reduce the nation’s total (public and private) outlay for health care. When you boil it down, though, there are only three variables you can cut: reduce the amount of medical care provided; reduce what providers of medical care earn for their products and services; and reduce intermediary costs. All are problematic.
I. Less Medical Care
One argument advanced by proponents of the various plans is that costs would be reduced by providing more care, because preventative care would prevent more expensive care from being needed… .Back on Earth, a rigorous study in the journal Circulation found that for cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, “if all the recommended prevention activities were applied with 100 percent success,” the prevention would cost almost 10 times as much as the savings, increasing the country’s total medical bill by 162 percent. That’s because prevention applied to large populations is very expensive, as shown by another report Elmendorf cites, a definitive review in the New England Journal of Medicine of hundreds of studies that found that more than 80 percent of preventive measures added to medical costs.
II. Medical Care For Less Cost
The issue of shortages brings us to the problem with the second option: rather than reducing the amount of care provided, reduce the amount paid to the people who provide it: doctors, nurses, and pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Certainly on the Left there is a fair amount of sentiment for making it less profitable to provide care. But there is really no getting around the basics of supply and demand: if we make it less profitable to become a doctor, we will end up with fewer doctors.
III. Cutting Out The Middleman
The elephant in the waiting room is the other big cost driver of intermediaries besides the scope of coverage and the cost of having shareholders and executives: lawsuits. Precise figures are again a subject of intense dispute, but a goodly chunk of what drives the amount of `unnecessary’ care provided, the cost of providing services and the cost of intermediaries is the need to protect against and pay for the cost of medical malpractice and denial of coverage litigation. None of the Democratic proposals, however, seek to make any practical inroads against this source of costs. Replacing a private system with a public one could arguably do so if the trial bar is effectively precluded from bringing against the government many of the kinds of lawsuits now used against private insurers – but aren’t liberals in favor of keeping those kinds of suits viable? And how likely is it that in the long run they won’t provide other mechanisms to keep one of their vital constituencies in business?
There will be no cost savings. There’s no sense in pretending otherwise.
The whole purpose of health care reform is to increase government control of the majority by an elite few. This elite few’s power and income will be vastly enriched by this health care coup d’e'tat – if the elite can pull it off. But make no mistake – that is, stop pretending otherwise – it has nothing to do with improving the lives of the American people. We do need to gear up for a large increase in demand for health care in America, because of the aging of America. If a higher percentage of the population is old we should expect that a higher percentage of GDP will be spent on health care. To accommodate this, we need to augment the total supply of health care. Price always rations whatever available supply there is. We don’t need government elites to ration it based on their political whim rather than through price. If an increased supply is encouraged by reducing lawsuits and building more hospitals and medical schools, we can expect lower prices (than otherwise) with the increased supply of practitioners…it’s really that simple.
To make health care and thus health insurance cheaper, the SUPPLY of health care must be increased. Rationing the existing supply just means that some people won’t get it. It’s absurd to think any other way! Voltaire said “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” If the government can get you to believe the absurdity that it can be trusted to decide who should receive health care and who should not , you will be indirectly involved in committing an atrocity – euthanasia. And we are NOT talking about assisted (voluntary) suicide, rather its deciding to end someone’s life, for them, and against their will. From Tony Perkin’s Family Research Council Washington Update:
While people in Washington debate the end-of-life issues in the President’s plan, people like Barbara Wagner are already experiencing them. She and others have been in the fight of their lives–and for them. In a chilling new TV report, Barbara talks about her battle with Oregon public health officials who refused to pay for her cancer treatments but did offer to subsidize “physician aid-in dying”–better known as assisted suicide. “I’m not ready to die,” she says, crying. “I said to them, ‘Who do you guys think you are? You’ll pay for my dying, but you won’t pay to help me live longer.’”
And she’s not the only one. Fellow Oregonian Randy Stroup applied for help to foot the bill for chemotherapy. He received a similar response: no to treatment, yes to euthanasia. In the President’s health care reform, rationing isn’t a matter of “if” but “when.” Even the President aired his concerns that “the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.” The President was clear about his response to these end-of-life issues in June when he said, “Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery but taking the painkiller.” In the push to cut costs, more liberals may push to cut lives short.
As with abortion coverage, plenty of liberals dispute that health care rationing is a part of the health care legislation. FRC Action has just released a list of 10 reasons why it is included and where you can find it in the bills. The greatest evidence comes not from what’s in the legislation but what isn’t. We made the point a few weeks ago that Republicans have tried on five different occasions to ensure that certain language in the bills is not used for rationing purposes-three times in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and twice in the House of Representatives. Each time, committee Democrats voted the amendments down. Of course, there’s also the fact that the provision on “end-of-life” planning for seniors in the House bill originated with Rep. Earl Blumenauer, a Democratic congressman from Oregon who has been a major proponent of the state’s assisted suicide law.
The bottom line is that health care rationing isn’t coming–it’s here. And until euthanasia is specifically prohibited in the legislation, the only thing that should be humanely killed is the plan to encourage it.
