Singer states: ”Health care is a scarce resource, and all scarce resources are rationed in one way or another.”
NC Sez: Bullshit! the only scarce resource in this country is common sense. If ANYONE NEEDS to see a doctor they go to the doctor. Yes, they will have to pay for that service just like they pay for any other service in America. Why pick on the health care industry?
Marriages end in 50% divorce, why not say, good marriages are scarce, and have the government pick and choose your mate? Why not? If the gov’t can decide your health care, why can’t they also decide your personal choice of a spouse? I mean geez, if you pick the wrong spouse, you might have disabled children out of the union, or perhaps if you marry the wrong spouse, your children might see you, and your spouse arguing in front of them, and that would damage the kids, and they would need life long 12-step programs and therapy. I mean, crap, MAN, if private companies like E-Harmony can pick spouses and be good at it, then why can’t the government do this job too?? Then the gov’t can ration marriage certificates if they decide too many children are being born! I mean, come on, you brain dead lefttards, there aren’t enough resources on mommy earth to handle all of these man-made crisis’!
Running health care is as insane as government run marriage, and there isn’t an argument that one can’t use for government run marriage that isn’t being used for government run health care!
Why is it some how politically incorrect for me to make my own health care decisions, including whether I want to own health insurance, or not, and the government NOT be okay with MY decisions and choices, BUT I have to be okay with the government taking over MY health care, forcing me to own health care insurance, but I have to be okay with them making MY decisions for me?
The government deciding for you and me means: THIS WILL NOT BE the free and independent AMERICA ANYMORE! THIS WILL CREATE A SOCIALIST COUNTRY with a caste system, AND POOR AND MIDDLE CLASS PEOPLE WILL SUFFER AND DIE BECAUSE the government is making the decisions! The rich won’t die because they will always have the money to get whatever kind of health care they choose!
You think health care is expensive now you just wait until you have a bloated bureaucracy that you have to pay for to run this so called more excellent way!!
by Peter Singer
You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much?
If you can afford it, you probably would pay that much, or more, to live longer, even if your quality of life wasn’t going to be good. But suppose it’s not you with the cancer but a stranger covered by your health-insurance fund. If the insurer provides this man — and everyone else like him — with Sutent, your premiums will increase. Do you still think the drug is a good value? Suppose the treatment cost a million dollars. Would it be worth it then? Ten million? Is there any limit to how much you would want your insurer to pay for a drug that adds six months to someone’s life? If there is any point at which you say, “No, an extra six months isn’t worth that much,” then you think that health care should be rationed.
In the current U.S. debate over health care reform, “rationing” has become a dirty word. Meeting last month with five governors,President Obama urged them to avoid using the term, apparently for fear of evoking the hostile response that sank the Clintons’ attempt to achieve reform. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published at the end of last year with the headline “Obama Will Ration Your Health Care,” Sally Pipes, C.E.O. of the conservative Pacific Research Institute, described how in Britain the national health service does not pay for drugs that are regarded as not offering good value for money, and added, “Americans will not put up with such limits, nor will our elected representatives.” And the Democratic chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Max Baucus, told CNSNews in April, “There is no rationing of health care at all” in the proposed reform.
Remember the joke about the man who asks a woman if she would have sex with him for a million dollars? She reflects for a few moments and then answers that she would. “So,” he says, “would you have sex with me for $50?” Indignantly, she exclaims, “What kind of a woman do you think I am?” He replies: “We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling about the price.” The man’s response implies that if a woman will sell herself at any price, she is a prostitute. The way we regard rationing in health care seems to rest on a similar assumption, that it’s immoral to apply monetary considerations to saving lives — but is that stance tenable?
Health care is a scarce resource, and all scarce resources are rationed in one way or another.
NC Sez: Bullshit! the only scarce thing in this country is common sense. If ANYONE NEEDS to see a doctor they go to the doctor. Yes, they will have to pay for that service just like they pay for any other service in America. Why pick on the health care industry?
Marriages end in 50% divorce, why not say, good marriages are scarce, and have the government pick and choose your mate? Why not? If the gov’t can decide your health care, why can’t they also decide your personal choice of a spouse? I mean geez, if you pick the wrong spouse, you might have disabled children out of the union, or perhaps if you marry the wrong spouse, your children might see you and your spouse arguing in front of them, and that would damage the kids, and they would need therapy. I mean, crap, MAN, if private companies like E-Harmony can pick spouses then why can’t the government do this job too???? Then the gov’t can ration marriage certificates if they decide too many children are being born! I mean, come on, you brain dead lefttards, there aren’t enough resources on mommy earth to handle all of these crisis’!
That’s how insane it is to have the mental disabled government bureaucrats running YOUR health care.
In the United States, most health care is privately financed, and so most rationing is by price: you get what you, or your employer, can afford to insure you for. But our current system of employer-financed health insurance exists only because the federal government encouraged it by making the premiums tax deductible. That is, in effect, a more than $200 billion government subsidy for health care. In the public sector, primarily Medicare, Medicaid and hospital emergency rooms, health care is rationed by long waits, high patient copayment requirements, low payments to doctors that discourage some from serving public patients and limits on payments to hospitals.
The case for explicit health care rationing in the United States starts with the difficulty of thinking of any other way in which we can continue to provide adequate health care to people on Medicaid and Medicare, let alone extend coverage to those who do not now have it. Health-insurance premiums have more than doubled in a decade, rising four times faster than wages. In May, Medicare’s trustees warned that the program’s biggest fund is heading for insolvency in just eight years. Health care now absorbs about one dollar in every six the nation spends, a figure that far exceeds the share spent by any other nation. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it is on track to double by 2035.
President Obama has said plainly that America’s health care system is broken. It is, he has said, by far the most significant driver of America’s long-term debt and deficits. It is hard to see how the nation as a whole can remain competitive if in 26 years we are spending nearly a third of what we earn on health care, while other industrialized nations are spending far less but achieving health outcomes as good as, or better than, ours.
NC Sez: America’s health care system IS NOT Broken. It’s the best in the world and while other socialist countries are moving away from this monolith nightmare, so called Free America is moving towards it? Where did common sense go? Remember Saul Alinksy: one has to pretend there is a crisis and, “Hey everyone! we have the solution for you!”
Rationing health care means getting value for the billions we are spending by setting limits on which treatments should be paid for from the public purse. If we ration we won’t be writing blank checks to pharmaceutical companies for their patented drugs, nor paying for whatever procedures doctors choose to recommend. When public funds subsidize health care or provide it directly, it is crazy not to try to get value for money. The debate over health care reform in the United States should start from the premise that some form of health care rationing is both inescapable and desirable. Then we can ask, What is the best way to do it?
NC Points out: If we dump the FDA bureaucraZy then the gov’t won’t be making back room deals with these same pharmaceuticals either! Gee, there’s a concept!
Last year Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence gave a preliminary recommendation that the National Health Service should not offer Sutent for advanced kidney cancer. The institute, generally known as NICE, is a government-financed but independently run organization set up to provide national guidance on promoting good health and treating illness. The decision on Sutent did not, at first glance, appear difficult. NICE had set a general limit of £30,000, or about $49,000, on the cost of extending life for a year. Sutent, when used for advanced kidney cancer, cost more than that, and research suggested it offered only about six months extra life. But the British media leapt on the theme of penny-pinching bureaucrats sentencing sick people to death. The issue was then picked up by the U.S. news media and by those lobbying against health care reform in the United States. An article in The New York Times last December featured Bruce Hardy, a kidney-cancer patient whose wife, Joy, said, “It’s hard to know that there is something out there that could help but they’re saying you can’t have it because of cost.” Then she asked the classic question: “What price is life?”
read the rest here
Readers Say: