Rationing

I've mention it before.  Rationing is incredibly dear to leftist hearts. 

Global warming is the latest rationale for folks on the left to propose some sort of rationing. Rationing is the answer to everything.  For poverty it's income redistribution, rationing everybody's combined income. When it's not income it's oil. Back in the 70's they were frantic with predictions that oil would run out.  Washington was actually printing ration stamps before somebody had the good sense to get rid of the oil price ceiling. Before oil, they went on about over population and the impending worldwide famine. Family planning's the ticket. We'll ration people.

When I wrote that in 2005 the topic was global warming.  Today we're talking about health care reform.  Oddly enough, progressives hope to sell it by insisting that reform will involve no rationing.  But when lefties say there won't be any rationing, can you really believe them?  Let's face it.  If there is one thing progressives are determined to do, it's ration something. 

It's as if lefties are driven to it.  They see a callousness in markets forces.  Markets are so damnably indifferent to things like skin color, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, and a raft of other traits that progressives use to evaluate the worthiness of one group over another.  In the lefty view free markets are an abysmal failure because they neglect historic oppression.  Progressives will correct this and other failures of the market.  They will take from the haves who are inherently evil for having, and give to the have-nots who are deserving because they don't have. 

Having is sort of like original sin.  It's a stain on the soul, and evidence of poor character.  You can't have unless you take.  If you take, odds are you've take from somebody else, someone weaker.  So, haves are likely to be evil.  This is intuitive to the enlightened progressive. 

Not having, on the other hand, is a sign of good character.  Not having is evidence, not only that you haven't taken from others, but also that someone else may have even taken from you -- an evil have, no doubt.  Therefore, have nots can be assumed good on two counts. 

The thing progressives seem to love most about rationing, is devising ways of evaluating relative worth in various circumstances -- a truly impossible task.  Lefties tackle it with relish anyway, and nowhere with such relish as in health care reform.  When progressives take steps to hold down the cost of health care, they will determine what treatments are worthwhile and what treatments aren't.  Naturally it will vary from one patient to the next, based on things like age and state of health.  It's critical that progressives come up with an accurate measurement of worth.  

A Martin Feldstein article in Opinion Journal explains how the current reform plan will go about it.

Although administration officials are eager to deny it, rationing health care is central to President Barack Obama's health plan. The Obama strategy is to reduce health costs by rationing the services that we and future generations of patients will receive.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers issued a report in June explaining the Obama administration's goal of reducing projected health spending by 30% over the next two decades. That reduction would be achieved by eliminating "high cost, low-value treatments," by "implementing a set of performance measures that all providers would adopt," and by "directly targeting individual providers . . . (and other) high-end outliers."

The president has emphasized the importance of limiting services to "health care that works." To identify such care, he provided more than $1 billion in the fiscal stimulus package to jump-start Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) and to finance a federal CER advisory council to implement that idea. That could morph over time into a cost-control mechanism of the sort proposed by former Sen. Tom Daschle, Mr. Obama's original choice for White House health czar. Comparative effectiveness could become the vehicle for deciding whether each method of treatment provides enough of an improvement in health care to justify its cost.

Imagine that.  "$1 billion in the fiscal stimulus package to jump-start Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) and to finance a federal CER advisory council to implement that idea."  There's that "death panel" Sarah was talking about.

But not to worry.  Our progressive friends assure us that this won't mean rationing.  Instead, progressives will devise a "fair" way of limiting services to "health care that works."  It will undoubtedly take all the important factors into consideration, like current health status, gender, and age of the person receiving care.  And you know, there might just be one of those historic wrongs to correct, too.  But there won't be any rationing.  Sure.