Sarah Palin has raised quite a stir with her Facebook articles attacking Obamacare. Quite correctly, she has pointed out that controlling costs will have to be done through rationing care which will lead to government agencies determining who will get the care they need to survive and who will not. Because health care is a scarce resource and we don't have the money to provide top-line care for everyone, it can't go any other way.
Because health care is a scarce resource and we don't have the money to provide top-line care for everyone, this is already happening. The current Death Boards live in your wallet. It's called money. When you run out of it, the care stops. There are lots of exceptions, but for the most part, you get the care you have earned. Earned is the operative word here.
If you choose to study electrical engineering and land a job with HP, you have earned health care under our current system. If you choose to smoke dope in high school and end up as the night manager of the local No-Tell Motel with tattoos all over your body and a Home Depot Sampler Set of fasteners piercing your face, you have not earned health care. The Death Board, to a great extent, is controlled by your actions. Obamacare does away with that.
In keeping with the theme of his administration, earning things is dismissed as irrelevant. What you earn will be given to the government who will allocate the goods and services as it sees fit. Of course there will be Death Boards. How could there not be? If the entire argument for Obamacare is that 47,000,000 are not being covered right now, it's idiotic to claim that we will be able to cover all 47,000,000 with state-of-the-art health care on demand. The same number of people will suffer from a lack of medicine as do now, only the determination of who suffers will be made by the government.
That's what happens with scarce goods. Not everyone can have them. That's because they're, you know, scarce. Like yachts.
7 comments:
KT,
Of course you are correct. In Oregon, where there is already assisted suicide AND government run health care guess what is the inevitable result? See my post on this chilling mixture.
Maybe the house can repeal the laws of supply and demand....
There is, of course, another possibility.
That the total amount of health care available will increase. This can and will happen, if and only if, the total amount spent on health care increases (supply and demand can work more than one way).
The down side is that that will mean the amount taken by the government to cover the costs will increase beyond the current cash flow, and, due to the simple truth that government bureaucracies are never efficient, there will be additional costs beyond that.
Ohioan, in order for supply to increase, the marginal cost hast to increase. That is, at the current levels of reimbursement, you only have N doctors willing to work the hours and get the education. To reach, say, 1.4N, you will need to increase the per unit costs, something exactly the opposite of the goals of Obamacare.
And then there is the notion that there is a small, finite number of candidates capable of becoming doctors in the first place ...
Althouse
The Great 'Prevention' Myth
Jon Stewart
Some more good links.
captcha: gynrolly
The way they will choose who lives or dies irks me horribly. Elderly will be ignored... and they are the men and women who fought for our freedom... now just to be left and abondoned to die because they are old. If people stop living as long due to this "health care reform" the wisdom dies with them.
And I do not appreciate the stereotypes on here. I have a bachelor's degree, and work for a well known International corporation, and I myself have quite a few piercings and tattoos. I earned my healthcare according to your reasoning, but I dont fit your stereotype. Maybe people like you are on this death board, making assumptions based on nothing real, only opinion
Of course you don't fit the stereotype, because you are not a doper in a dead end job who spent tons of money on body-modifications, K.
Try not jumping to take offense. Life will be nicer.
Post a Comment