Posted by
Always To The Right on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 4:48:26 PM
Greg Hengler at Townhall
captures this revealing moment in the Senate Finance Committee hearings
on health-care reform. The speaker, Professor Stuart Altman of Brandeis
University, tells the committee that resources get wasted in the
American health-care system, especially for one segment of the
population. Professor Altman says he’s reluctant to mention it, but why
waste money on in-depth treatment for people who won’t live long
anyway? Better to warehouse them and save the resources for the young
Once again, we have people taking the shortage, rationing approach
to its logical conclusion. In a non-shortage, free-market approach,
people can choose for themselves whether to pursue cost-effective
strategies based on their own resources, and the free market would
incentivize the creation of enough resources to meet the demand. Only
by restricting choice and setting prices will resources become scarce,
which we have seen gradually for the last several decades in our own
heavily-regulated health-care system, and seen dramatically in the
various single-payer systems around the world.
What happens when the state controls all the resources? New
resources do not develop, and the government winds up rationing care
based on its own priorities, and not the priorities of the patients or
caregivers. Professor Altman’s suggestion that the elderly get hospice
treatment to save scarce care resources is exactly the kind of
decisions the state will make for its citizens, and it won’t be limited
to the elderly, either. Anyone whose value does not show a positive
“cost-benefit” ratio to the state will also likely wind up without the
kind of care necessary to stay alive and healthy.
Progressives who back this plan get offended that people with more
resources can get better care, just as they can get better housing,
better food, and better entertainment, among many other things. Like in
all other arenas, their prescription for equality of result
will mean that everyone gets treated equally poorly, and that we will
eventually start culling out the weak in favor of the strong. We’ve
essentially returned to the eugenics arguments of the early 20th
century, a dark period of human history we should be avoiding rather
than embracing on the floor of the Senate.