George Will on Healthcare Reform
Will makes a good point when he states that all healthcare is rationed at some level by price or by politics. The Republicans, while banging the “rationing” gong ever loudly, have failed to delineate this point well enough. And the Democrats want us to believe that they can re-engineer the laws of supply and demand.
While I am pleased to see this debate come to the forefront, I am troubled that few out there want to say the hard truths. The world in which we live is one dominated by scarcity- humans have a nearly unlimited set of needs and desires. Yet at any given moment there are a finite set of resources to satisfy those desires. Hence supply and demand dynamics will always play a role in the distribution of any good- including healthcare. It’s up to us to decide who we want to do the parsing: market forces or political forces.
The real distinction between healthcare and other goods/services is not complexity or unpredictibility. It is the expectation of the providers and consumers: it is expected at every interaction that the consumer receive the highest level of care. This professional ethic has been codified in the Hippocratic oath and rightfully passed down through the generations. And we all benefit from this.
The question then becomes: what is the highest level of care? There are many instances in which people assume that the highest level of care equates with the most expensive care. In some cases this is true and in some cases this is not true. I have done some research in the orthopedic device field concerning this topic. It turns out that there are some laws that discourage MD’s from actively containing costs - more to come on that topic at another time
