Hugh Hewitt
Flu pandemic today, health care rationing tomorrow
By: Hugh Hewitt
Examiner Columnist
May 4, 2009
“Reconciliation” is Beltway-speak for the imposition of the rationing of medical services and goods on a largely unsuspecting American population by means of simple majorities in both houses of Congress.
The reality of President Obama’s vision for medicine in America is a “single-payer” system, and the reality of “single-payer” is rationing. Because the government is the ultimate provider of medical services, it provides only what it can afford, and when its money runs out, your care ends.
Almost anyone familiar with the push for what is euphemistically called “health care reform” knows that many experts on the left believe that far too many dollars are spent on providing health care to people in the final weeks or months of their earthly lives. If controls can be placed on these expenditures, then more of the government’s resources will be available for younger and much healthier people.
Thus, rationing’s first target is going to be the expensive demands made by the elderly. The new system will simply scoff at the idea of a liver transplant for anyone over the age of 65. Or 60. Or maybe even 55. Liver transplants are expensive.
Rationing’s second target will have to be those very expensive services laid out for the profoundly disabled. Any ideology which rejects the value of even completely healthy late term fetuses (and support for late term abortion rights absolutely means the rejection of that value) is simply not going to be able to support the expenditure of scarce resources on hugely expensive medical interventions on behalf of the severely handicapped.
After the easy cuts are made at the beginning and end of life, expect the government to begin to squeeze on disfavored behaviors via the minimization or withdrawal of medical care for, say, lung cancers in smokers or heart disease among the obese.
And if you should pass a prescribed number of children, well, surely you can’t expect the government to treat a family of eight the same as it does a family of three –where’s the equity in that?
“Equity” is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, or in this case, the holder of the purse strings. If Obama/Pelosi/Reid “health care” reform blasts through Congress on jam-down minimum majorities and with a huge delegation of subsequent rule-writing authority built in, the holder will be the federal government.
Most amazing about this debate is that thus far there hasn’t been any. Republicans in Congress have been off-balance on the issue from the summer of 2008. Their confusion has spread to obviously interested parties like the AMA and the insurance industry.
The AARP seems not to even understand that most of its membership will be shocked at the prospect of rationing and unsatisfied with explanations that the D.C. staff didn’t see it coming.
This is a way of saying that there is as of yet no organized resistance. That may change, but the hypnotic effect of the new president seems to have worked most completely on the many interested parties who ought to be organizing now to stop or at least slow to a 10K pace the sprint underway to radically rewrite the rules of American healthcare.
The approach of a pandemic may also sober up the legislators rushing off to rewrite the rules. The apparently mild version of the H1N1 influenza A virus that has hop-scotched across the country and the globe reminds of nothing so much as the first wave of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. Ninety years ago that virus showed up in the spring and then vanished in the summer, only to reappear in its virulent and extraordinarily deadly form in the fall.
If virus history repeats itself, the second wave of this year’s H1N1 bug will return with the reaper just as Congress completes its rewrite of the rules of health care access. Let’s hope there’s enough Tamiflu to go around, as the federal regulators will hardly have had time to sort out the winners and losers of that potentially very important lottery.
Examiner columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
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