Read Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel's (et. at.) paper on the proper way to ration health care. If you're interested, you can find it at www.thelancet.com . It's in Vol. 373, Issue 9661, pgs 423 - 431. The issue date is Jan. 31, 2009.
It's pretty disgusting. There's just something freakishly cold about it and machine-like, as though it's computer-generated. Only a computer might give it more color and decorate it with shiny, spinning things.
Visited the National Archives a long time ago, where the original copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are displayed. At the time, they had only a long, narrow corridor off to one side of the building for other exhibits. When I was there, on display were artifacts from the German Third Reich, including an accounting ledger -- just an ordinary, hardbound accounting ledger with blue and red rules -- that listed the names of those gassed that day. Just keeping track, you know; those people won't need dinner.
Anyway, the Ezekiel Emanuel article is like that. Same sort of tone.
Interesting that the article begins by assuming that medical resources, including items like transplantable organs, are in scarce supply. Then it outlines eight methods for allocating these scarce resources. It ends up by suggesting that something called the "whole-life" system be used for rationing these medical resources. Like, babies have potential, but they have little invested in them in terms of care and education. Old people have had these investments, but they have only a limited time to make any contributions. So people from age 15 through 40 should receive scarce medical resources -- or at least the healthy ones. The chronically ill, after all, face the same kinds of issues as the elderly.
(Anybody see the epic, Shoah? The article was actually a lot like that.)
Anyway, what's wrong with that article is its fundamental approach.
I'll agree that medical resources are scarce, but I'd qualify even that, saying some medical resources are scarce. Now there are several ways you can solve that situation. One is to contrive a scheme to ration the distribution of these resources. Another is to expand the supply of resources.
The second approach wasn't considered. Apparently it was beyond the scope of the article, or perhaps beyond the scope of its authors' intellects, imaginations, and personal preferences.
In a free market system driven by profit motive -- be the "profit" money, fame, humanitarianism, etc. -- when a scarcity in any field is recognized, it becomes an opportunity. I mean, there are waiting lists to get into medical schools in the USA.... though this might change with socialized medicine.
Exploiting these opportunites requires the freedom to make personal choices that an individual regards as rewarding in some way. Interested, motivated, and qualified individuals have to be free to pursue a solution, either through education, by developing new production sources and/or techniques, devising effective substitutes, more efficient delivery systems and so on.
When the government controls an industry -- any industry -- it sets the operational goals and standards, and mandates things like "best practices." In a government managed environment, best practices are the death of experimentation, innovation, and research. Government control, because it's enforced by the threat of punishment of some kind, tends to serve as a big wet blanket on creativity and even carefully calculated risk-taking.
The government can't possibly develop a "best practices" prescription to fit every possible medical situation. All it can do is limit the options to an approved few and chastize those in the medical industry who stray from the norm.
The development of vaccines and medicines supplied the need for cures to many illnesses. Studying the effects of sanitation in hospitals was on the frontier of medical science only 150 years ago. Nowadays, some researchers are learning how to grow replacement organs from DNA.
When people are free, there are no problems that can't be solved. Often the solutions create other problems, but that's part of the risk and the process of growth. Medical solutions in particular that are developed by a responsible person or organization are usually tested as well as they can be before they're unleashed on the general public -- the developer usually wants to succeed, not kill people. And in the US so far, medications have been given with consent -- not necessarily the way a government-run health system would operate. I mean, to quote The Comrade, why prescribe a blue pill when a red one will do just as well?
Under the current regime in Washington DC, things like personal freedom, innovation, growth and development are all being dumped on the side of the road like so much useless baggage. Instead, we get "green" standards and icky stuff like the Ezekiel Emanuel article.
Just another example of the lunatics -- or perhaps self-anointed gods -- running the asylum. But this is truly chilling.
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