Health Care Rationing?

Here, we dive right into controversial topics--first up, Obama's health care plans and socialized medicine. The main problem with this is, as with all well-meaning but misguided socialist plans, how to pay for it. What I want to focus on here is the philosophy behind the current health care debate...is health care a right? And how should we ration it?

Those on the left are fond of saying that health care is a right. What I want to know is where did this right come from? The practice of medicine evolved over thousands of years. The science of medicine evolved through trial and error, painstaking pharmaceutical experimentation, and even grave robbing. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, died on operating tables for our acquisition of this knowledge. Now, if health care is a fundamental right, how it is that it took so long for us to get to this point in medical science? And when exactly in human history did it become a right?

You might protest that just because something is a right doesn't mean we don't have to fight and sacrifice for it. After all, our freedoms have been hard won on the battlefield. Fair enough. But what the liberals don't seem to appreciate is that health care has to be provided by someone, and those who provide it have families to support. They deserve to be paid. And that which has to be paid for is not a right. Our freedom of speech, our freedom of worship, and the right to bear arms, are all things we are freely entitled to without paying for them. The poll tax--making people pay to exercise their constitutional right to vote--was declared unconstituational by the Supreme Court.

Conservatives have taken to saying that any government-run health care program would need to involve rationing of health care. They are absolutely correct on this. But they're a little bit disingenuous as well, because whether it's government run or privately financed, health care would still need to be rationed. The only question is who is going to ration it--the government? The insurance companies? Doctors? Currently, health care is rationed according the people's ability to pay. If you cannot pay for health care (or don't qualify for government support), then you don't get it. That favors the rich and the very poor. But though the system is imperfect, the act of rationing is not necessarily bad. We should not all be forever entitled to whatever heroic measures exist to prolong our lives. Note that I said prolong our lives, not save our lives, because all life must eventually end. Death is a natural and inevitable part of life. That's hard to accept when you're staring into the face of death, and even harder when you're trying to climg onto a dying loved one. Yet death is part of life, and our resources to extend it and postpone the inevitable are limited. So let's not pretend that rationing will not take place under either kind of system.

The only question is, as stated above, who's going to ration it. Are you comfortable trusting the government with the power of making this life-and-death decision? That just gives government too much power. That's the main reason--other than all the economic failings of socialism--why we must reject socialized medicine.