Death Panels and Decision Makers

The American Thinker ^ | August 26, 2009 | Joseph Ashby

[Scanian]

When the town halls adjourn and the cameras stop rolling, the health care debate is about one thing: decisions. Issues like end-of-life counseling, comparative effectiveness boards, uninsured Americans, and rising health care costs all, when examined, reduce to a question of who will make medical decisions.

One of President Obama's answers at a recent town hall meeting properly sets the parameters of the health care debate. When asked about potential government rationing of medical care he responded with the following:

The concern is that somehow [my proposals] will mean rationing of care, right? -- that somehow some government bureaucrat out there will be saying, well, you can't have this... procedure because some bean-counter decides that this is not a good way to use our health care dollars....

Right now insurance companies are rationing care. They are basically telling you what's covered and what's not.... So why is it that people would prefer having insurance companies make those decisions?

Cutting through the focus-group-enhanced rhetorical smokescreen, Obama's answer is essentially that his plan will not lead to rationing but...government rationing won't be any worse than what exists now. Thus the debate is not whether the government will ration care, but whether that government rationing will be better or worse than the current system.

For argument's sake, let's accept the president's premise that the debate over health care is a simple matter of government decision makers versus private decision makers.

Government advocates contend the absence of profit allows the public plan to save money over their private counterparts. Without the private sector's greedy need for profit, government will provide better coverage (that is, make better decisions) at a lower price. After all, they claim, billions of dollars in insurance industry profit could be taken right of the top of a public health plan.

What these big-government backers fail to recognize is the positive effect profits have. Economist Dr. Thomas Sowell explains:

To the economically illiterate, if some company makes a million dollars in profit, this means that their products cost a million dollars more than they would have cost without profits. It never occurs to such people that these products might cost several million dollars more to produce than if they were produced by enterprises operating without the incentives to be efficient created by the prospect of profits.

The cure-for-corporate-greed theory has a weakness beyond the lack of incentive.

[samtheman]

Without the private sector's greedy need for profit, government will provide better coverage (that is, make better decisions) at a lower price.

So this should work for telecommunications, too. Right?

Let's get all private companies out of telecommunications and have the government be the Single Supplier of cell phones and cell service and all other telecom services and let's see what happens to prices. They should go down. Right?

[Helotes]

This is principal problem with government being in charge of so personal an aspect of your life.

When the government decides you don’t get something because they say so, they can force you to obey even if they have to break your door down, take all the money out of your bank account, put you in jail.

This make government control of your health care pretty creepy. As daunting as it is now, I’d rather argue with Blue Cross Blue Shield than some g-man