A lot of buzz has been made that there will be “death panels” (Sarah Palin) that will make life and death medical decisions.
Fortunately, teh end-of-life counselling mandate looks like it is losing steam, if not already dead, in the Senate.
That doesn’t mean the death panels won’t happen!! Let me walk through the logic where government management of “pricing” must lad to rationing. That rationing leads to deaths.
Like the frog who slowly dies in cold water being boiled, no-one rings a bell and says “Mrs. Smith will be terminated.” It is the mind-numbing bureaucracy of government controlled health care that achieves the same effect.
Again, once government assumes the role of paying for a substantial part of health care costs, either through subsidy or direct pay, it has a vested interest in controlling costs.
In Canada, where I immigrated from, the governments response was to restrict the number of practicing doctors, close hospitals and reduce spending on new equipment and procedures until there were well established. (Where would they be well established? In the United States, of course, that encouraged experimentation and development of new cures!)
Since the supply of services is controlled (and therefore costs become predictable and manageable), how do you manage the demand side of the equation? In a free market system, price intermediates. But in a perfect socialist society, we can’t allow that to happen! We will just have people line up for services. We will have a “board of experts” decide the order in which they line up.
This bureaucratic board, combined with a limitation of services, is effectively is the death sentence for many people.
So in Canada, in 2008, you wait 17.3 weeks for your general practitioner. 900,000 people are waiting for hospital beds. Death rates from colon cancer is projected to be 66% higher in Canada.
Government control kills.
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