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Rationing, and not only withholding care from the elderly.
President Obama’s TV health-care forum on Wednesday evening was useful, because revealing. Namely, Mr. Obama shared more than he probably intended about the kind of rationing that his health plan will inevitably impose.
At one point in the town hall, broadcast from the East Room by ABC news, a woman named Jane Sturm told the story of her 105-year-old mother, who, at 100, was told by an arrhythmia specialist that she was too old for a pacemaker. She ended up getting a second option, and the operation, for which Ms. Sturm credits her survival.
“Look, the first thing for all of us to understand that is we actually have some — some choices to make about how we want to deal with our own end-of-life care,” Mr. Obama replied. After discussing ways “we as a culture and as a society [can start] to make better decisions within our own families and for ourselves,” he continued that in general “at least we can let doctors know and your mom know that, you know what? Maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.”
What Mr. Obama is describing is his preferred health-care future. If or when the Administration’s speculative cost-cutting measures under universal health care fail to produce savings, government will start explicitly limiting patient access to treatments and services regarded as too expensive. Democrats deny this eventuality, but health planners will have no choice, given that the current entitlement system is already barreling toward insolvency without adding millions of new people to the federal balance sheet.
Earlier, a physician asked Mr. Obama if he would subject his own family to the restrictions of a national health plan, even if specialists recommended treatments that weren’t covered. The President was noncommittal: “And you’re absolutely right that, if it’s my family member, if it’s my wife, if it’s my children, if it’s my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.” We suspect most Americans would agree.
Beware Obamacare’s Fine Print
Congress’s Health Care Double Standard
In a desperate scramble to pay for the soaring costs of President Obama’s health care plan, the Senate Finance Committee is contemplating taxing for the first time the health insurance benefits workers get from their employers. One approach would tax the benefits only of workers earning over $100,000. An alternate proposal would tax the value of health care benefits that exceed a cap.
But the taxes wouldn’t be applied equally. Union members serving under collective bargaining agreements would be exempt, even though they often have the richest and most extensive packages of benefits. Union officials have told Democratic leaders of Congress that because collective bargaining agreements can last several years, they should be exempt from any tax because contracts can’t be changed quickly enough to avoid it.
The real reason, of course, is that unions have political clout and are exercising it. The exemption is “a means of making sure that unions are foursquare behind any reform bill that comes out,” Henry Aaron, a Brookings Institution scholar, told the Washington Examiner.
There’s a reason the Obama health care plan is being rushed through Congress this summer — because the American people would likely never support it if given time to absorb and understand such fine print. If the union carve-out isn’t sufficient to excite public anger, wait till you hear about the version of the Obama plan prepared by Senator Edward Kennedy, which would specifically exempt Members of Congress from many of its provisions.
As the U.S. Office of Personnel Management notes, Members of Congress “enjoy the widest selection of health plans in the country.” According to page 114 of the Kennedy bill, a similar array of choices would not be available to other Americans in the future. Instead, they would be shunted into health insurance plans under the straightjacket of whatever the government decides is a “basic” plan.
The goal would be to restrict care for the general public in order to control costs, while making sure Congress gets the gold-plated attention it’s accustomed to. Ultimately, the rest of us would be asked to trade a private insurance company as gatekeeper for a government gatekeeper. The difference, of course, is that most of us can fire our insurance gatekeeper. Just try to do that once the government fills that role.
—John Fund
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