From the Guardian:This is as good a reason as any for limits on governmental power.
And that’s the trouble with services and institutions run from the taxpayer’s purse, administered by centralists and bureaucrats. It becomes a carrot or a stick for interventionists to intervene in your life. Its delivery depends on your compliance with the diktats and whims of the democracy, or of bureaucrats. Your standard of living becomes a bargaining chip. Don’t conform? You might be deemed unworthy of hospital treatment.A majority of doctors support measures to deny treatment to smokers and the obese, according to a survey that has sparked a row over the NHS‘s growing use of “lifestyle rationing”.
Some 54% of doctors who took part said the NHS should have the right to withhold non-emergency treatment from patients who do not lose weight or stop smoking. Some medics believe unhealthy behaviour can make procedures less likely to work, and that the service is not obliged to devote scarce resources to them.
Education, politics, and anything else that catches my attention.
Monday, April 30, 2012
Do You Really Want Government Running Your Health Care?
This is one of the many reasons I don't:
A majority of "doctors" support this, but you put it on govt run health care? I guess that idea about decisions being left to the doctor and patient go out the window. And I guess you don't see insurance agencies practicing the same rationing?
ReplyDeleteOh, that's right. You're protected in a large government pool from that. So, you don't really understand how rationing works for people in the real world.
Well, that's big govt for you.
I notice you focus on the Guardian's part but not the commentary afterward. How conveeeeeeeeenient for you.
ReplyDeleteWell, shouldn't I focus on the facts - as opposed to your complete misinterpretation.
ReplyDeleteJust because you write it, D., doesn't make it true.
And pretending that ideas you don't like don't have credence doesn't demonstrate the strongest grip on reality. I'm thinking that's why a lot of Obamacare fans were so surprised at the arguments before the Supreme Court, and so dismayed at how poorly defended the government's weak arguments in favor. I could almost feel sorry for the guy. Almost.
ReplyDeleteYes, but ethos matters. And for someone who has never complained about problems with his government-funded healthcare, you have an oddly negative perspective.
ReplyDeleteIf your argument is that everything I have, and everything I do, is "govt funded" because I'm a teacher, then your argument fails. Am I taking a "govt funded" trip to Europe this summer? Silly argument, Trix are for kids.
ReplyDeleteI guess the question is, at what point in the evolution of a socialized medicine system does a doctor stop being a doctor and start being a government bureaucrat? Obviously, for 54% of doctors under NHS the question's answered and the time is "now".
ReplyDeleteOh, and everybody understands rationing. It's just that socialized medicine is always sold with the implication that there won't be any rationing because if there is rationing why's that better then the current system? Turns out not all rationing is the same since in a socialized system rationing's done according to political influence which a lot of people find both unnerving and unfair. More unfair then rationing occurring due to income.
After all, a rich guy's liable to kick a few bucks towards a free clinic but a bureaucrat in government agency or a powerful politician? Not likely to willingly share their access to superior medical care with hoi-poloi.
And which part of health insurance companies dropping sick patients, denying treatments, limiting groups negotiation of benefits, excluding certain prescription drugs, etc. is not "rationing" health care. How are insurance actuaries and executives not bureaucrats?
ReplyDeleteYour double standards and naivete never cease to amaze me, Allen. Why do I feel like you're already covered by Medicare, or won't turn it down the minute you're eligible?
Hmmm.
And there we have the coy implication that there won't be rationing under socialized medicine.
ReplyDeleteNot true of course and worse then economic rationing since the medical care of the politically powerful comes out of the lower standard of medical care forced on the politically powerless.
Since there's no reply to make to the charge, like all good ideologues you deal with the question by ignoring it when violence is unavailable to suppress dissent. But the question's still hanging there and is part of the reason Obamacare's not quite the political triumph you lefties hoped it would be. I'm of the opinion that it's part of the reason for the huge losses of the left in the 2010 mid-terms and will be a continuing drag on the left's political aspirations.
Oh, and you might want to save your juvenile rhetorical techniques for arguments with juveniles.
A bad idea doesn't become a good idea just because you've managed to so arrange circumstances that people are forced to use it. It's still a bad idea and the resistance to that bad idea won't come to an end just because some agency of government's passed law making that bad idea the law of the land. Bad law once made can be unmade and that's what we're in the process of doing.
Government-run health care's first-line rationing is by limiting access; you can't get an appointment. The military and the VA already does that.
ReplyDeleteThe last time I checked, the average wait time for treatment of prostate cancer in Canada was over 4 months - wait to see a urologist, wait for testing, wait for treatment. The Canadian system "works" because 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border. I'm sure the two women in labor that had to be air-lifted to the great metropolises of Missoula, MT and Grand Forks, ND because there were no Canadian NICU beds available enjoyed the experience thoroughly. I knew an orthopedic surgeon who practiced in Buffalo in the OJ Simpson era, and a large chunk of his practice was Canadian. Coming here for treatment has been so common that the Canadian government now won't pay for non-emergency care here. If you die in the 6 months before you get your cardiac surgery, like a friend's neighbor, too bad.
Thought so, Allen.
ReplyDeleteTrouble is, anon, that lefties don't care about those sorts of anecdotes even if, taken together, they indicate an underlying truth. They just don't care.
ReplyDeleteThey want it, it's someone's responsibility to give it to them and that is just that.
They don't care that 35% of Ontario residents don't have a primary care physician, a necessary gatekeeper to the medical care system. They don't care that well-connected Canadians have already "line-jumped" to get care to which they weren't entitled. They don't care that England got its first gamma knife almost twenty years after the first machine was installed in the U.S. They don't care that the Quebec Supreme Court determined that letting people languish on a waiting list until they die doesn't fulfill the intent of the Canadian health care legislation, which sent a shock wave through the Canadian medical care establishment.
All lefties care about is getting what they want and what they want, in the case of medicine, is to never have to give a thought to their access to medical care. Since uncertainty, in the case of medical care, is really frightening lefties want to make the scary stuff go away. So, it's someone's job to "make it so"; to give an order so that lefties can comfort themselves with the convenient belief that the situation's resolved to their liking.
It isn't resolved to their liking but it's resolved in a fashion that allows them to believe their demands have been satisfied and their needs filled. The illusion will do if the reality's unobtainable.
What does that sound like to you? To me it sounds like a self-centered and spoiled child and that's what I think lefties are. Spoiled, self-indulgent, self-centered children enjoying the fact that, due to the date of their birth, they get to pass as adults.