Let's have a Discussion About Health Care Service Rationing

Missing in the debate about health care change is the obvious requirement to ration services.

Adding millions more people to a government system without stringent cost control, including rationing, defies common sense and is a prescription for higher deficits or massive tax increases, likely both. Other nations with a government-run system implement rationing in one form or another. Yet, on a personal level, denial of service is a tough pill to swallow.

Those who contend that 'health care is a basic human right' are obliged to answer the question: how much care and at what cost? Of course, the devil is in the details, but I might favor rationing, if I understand how it will applied.

This mad rush by Congress and the President for massive restructuring is wrong. We deserve a debate that is clear, reasoned and thoughtful. We should understand both the personal and system ramifications of overhauling health care, an industry that accounts for one sixth of our economy, before plunging headlong into it. Clear information for that debate should be coming from our Congressional delegation and the health care industry. But it's not. Instead we get generalities from the President and from most lawmakers.

President Obama recently extracted promises from the hospital industry and the drug companies to save $Billions. We deserve to know how those savings will be accomplished. Will hospitals and doctors choose to earn less? Will they ration procedures, gain speculative efficiencies from electronic health records? If the cost savings are real, I want to know how, where and when they will be achieved.

Vermonters should understand how restricting services will be accomplished. We don't even hear the word rationing used because our political leaders and others are afraid to talk about it. Yet, we obviously cannot afford a system of medical care that treats every person for every condition with all possible means regardless of costs.