The government has to do something about health care just to bring its own costs down (it already pays for about half of all health care in the U.S.) It could do this sensibly, by changing the tax rules that lead to the wrong kind of insurance. If this isn't going to happen,
. . . the relevant political choice is between government rationing and continued high levels of health-care spending. Rationing is bad policy. It forces individuals with different preferences to accept the same care. It also imposes an arbitrary cap on the future growth of spending instead of letting it evolve in response to changes in technology, tastes and income. In my judgment, rationing would be much worse than excessive care.
But rationing it will be, which is at the heart of ObamaCare, the illusions of its supporters notwithstanding:
The White House Council of Economic Advisers issued a report in June explaining the Obama administration's goal of reducing projected health spending by 30% over the next two decades. That reduction would be achieved by eliminating "high cost, low-value treatments," by "implementing a set of performance measures that all providers would adopt," and by "directly targeting individual providers . . . (and other) high-end outliers."
The president has emphasized the importance of limiting services to "health care that works." To identify such care, he provided more than $1 billion in the fiscal stimulus package to jump-start Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) and to finance a federal CER advisory council to implement that idea. That could morph over time into a cost-control mechanism of the sort proposed by former Sen. Tom Daschle, Mr. Obama's original choice for White House health czar. Comparative effectiveness could become the vehicle for deciding whether each method of treatment provides enough of an improvement in health care to justify its cost.
Comments
Leo:
Makes you wonder what the outcry would be "if" the gov't were to RATION something called...welfare??
(And here I thought rationing was something that occurred during wartime, such as those years between 1940-1945)
;)