Ok, no cable, but UHF reception's great!
When medical care is rationed, the biggest users will be the biggest losers.
With Obamacare, medical spending will be like baking one pie for three siblings. If one sibling gets a bigger piece that automatically means the other two siblings get smaller pieces. The one-pie system has a built-in automatic source of conflict.
The elderly consume 70% of all health-care spending.[updated here and here] That means that when it comes to cost control they will bear the brunt of the burden. If we don’t cut spending on the elderly we can’t reduce costs without simply denying care for everyone else. When it comes down to a choice between spending on old people and children, the elderly know full well who we are going to pick.
When Quinn the Eskimo gets here, every old one is gonna die.
we need to realize that medical care … and everything else that’s not available in unlimited quantities at zero cost… is by definition ‘rationed’. the mechanism might change. in our system, ‘price’ is the normal way goods and services are rationed. some things are thought to be too important to allow them to be allocated by the pricing system, so we provide education for ‘free’ to 12th grade, foodstamps for the poor and, amazingly, medical care for 90% of the population for next to nothing. if the price system is not allowed to allocate flu shots, new hips and defibrillators, who should do it? it is just a fact that more new hips will be implanted at a zero cost to the patient than would be implanted at a cost of $25,000. so if we don’t want to have 25% of our economy dedicated to caring for the health needs of an aging population, we need either the pricing mechanism of capitalism or bureaucratic decisions between conflicting claims for hips and other medical demands. pick your poison.
How about tort reform? The money saved from doctors practicing defensive medicine will more that cover the cost of the uninsured. It is as simple as that.
However, the trial lawyer lobby has a special place in Obama’s heart.
“When it comes down to a choice between spending on old people and children, the elderly know full well who we are going to pick.”
That may be the PC conclusion and that favored by the chattering classes. But as a soon-to-be senior, don’t be too confident I’ll go along. One legacy of the administration’s efforts to ration seniors may well be a militant class of oldsters who tend to vote in greater numbers than other age groups and won’t put up with being cheated out of what they have been promised and what they’ve paid for. Children don’t vote, and most families do not include children.
J wrote: “However, the trial lawyer lobby has a special place in Obama’s heart.”
Yes, they do. See my post on the subject here:
http://libertarianadvocate.blogspot.com/2009/07/lawyers-obamacare-nice-return-on-their.html