The Dishonesty of the New York Times in the Debate Over Health Care

By Noel Bagwell
July 16, 2009

“If there is any point at which you say, ‘No, an extra six months isn’t worth that much,’ then you think that health care should be rationed.”

- Peter Singer, Why We Must Ration Health Care,
The New York Times, July 15, 2009

I would respectfully disagree with Mr. Singer, as would, I believe, most clear-thinking Americans.  Mr. Singer relates, as an analogy to his reasoning, the bawdy joke about a man propositioning a woman for $1 million and, after she accepts, trying to haggle the price down. The moral of the joke is that “if a woman will sell herself at any price, she is a prostitute,” but is that really the case?

More relevantly to the discussion of health care, the question could be phrased, does putting a limit on how much one is willing to spend to extend one’s life or improve one’s health over a finite period of time necessarily require us to ration health care?

I contend that it does not. Under the current health care system, the only rationing of which I am aware is the rationing of transplant organs, according to very ethical practices. Occasionally, one hears about limited availability of influenza vaccines, but aside from that, I can’t really recall an instance of “rationing” health care in the United States – certainly not the sort of rationing that is the norm in countries where socialized medicine / health care is the so-called “standard.”

In a fit of uncharacteristic honesty, Mr. Singer cites the following facts:

“The case for explicit health care rationing in the United States starts with the difficulty of thinking of any other way in which we can continue to provide adequate health care to people on Medicaid and Medicare, let alone extend coverage to those who do not now have it. Health-insurance premiums have more than doubled in a decade, rising four times faster than wages. In May, Medicare’s trustees warned that the program’s biggest fund is heading for insolvency in just eight years. Health care now absorbs about one dollar in every six the nation spends, a figure that far exceeds the share spent by any other nation. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it is on track to double by 2035.” (emphasis added; remember the phrase in bold; we’ll come back to that)

Yet, even after this candid observation with regard to the government’s track record on involvement with the health care industry, somehow (read: leftist ideology compels him), Mr. Singer is able to conclude that the reason health care is so expensive is because government – which is, in Mr. Singer’s view of course, always efficient and honest (unless Republicans are in charge) – is not involved enough.

Mr. Singer holds up Britain, where health care rationing is S.O.P., as the model for health care:

“In Britain, everyone has health insurance. In the U.S., some 45 million do not, and nor are they entitled to any health care at all, unless they can get themselves to an emergency room.”

The assumption on which Mr. Singer seems to be operating is that people, generally speaking, are “entitled” to health care. They’re not. They’re certainly not Constitutionally entitled to health care. There is no “entitled to health care” clause anywhere in the U.S. Constitution. The health care industry is precisely that – an industry. Industries are comprised of businesses. Businesses exist to make a profit. Incidentally, the health care industry also provides, as a product, goods and services that promote health and longevity.

What liberals, secular-progressives and, apparently, most Democrats and some Republicans fail to understand is that, while we do have a Constitutional right to life (which they ignore, when it conflicts with the unconstitutional right to “a woman’s right to have a doctor stab her baby in the head, suck its brains out and discard the corpse” – a.k.a. “the right to choose”), we do not have a Constitutional right to a certain quality of life. We have the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The pursuit. Not the guarantee.

SIDE NOTE: Interestingly, that phrase was originally intended by Jefferson to be written “life, liberty and property,” (a phrase he used prolifically throughout his writings, and which has its roots in the writings of John Locke) but the Founding Fathers – you know the old, white guys that liberals hate for their closed-minded, religious way of seeing things, who dared to use words like “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence – had the foresight to change “property” to “pursuit of happiness” in order to protect slaves, in the hope that one day this nation would live up to the assertion that “all men are created equal,” and abolish slavery. (More on “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” vs. “life, liberty and property” here.)

Equality is a funny concept. You see, if you really practice equality, none of us are better than any of the others of us. That means that no one is very well suited to the task of determining who should live or who should die or when or how. That’s part of the reason we have laws against murdering each other. What specialist is qualified to put a price tag on any moment, to say nothing of six months, of anyone else’s life? What bureaucrat is so qualified?

Accepting rationing means that you trust the government and the bureaucrats in charge of your health care to properly determine the value of each moment of your life, and ration your health care in such a way as to properly care for those precious moments. What happens when you disagree with the bureaucrats about how much a moment – or six months or a year or more – of your life is worth? You lose; that’s what… and not just in the sense that you lose the argument. You lose in the sense of losing your life. Literally.

Oh, by the way, that’s unconstitutional… depriving someone of their life (technically, it’s unconstitutional to deprive someone of their life “without due process of law,” but I’m sure the government will decide what constitutes “due process” in time to save your life).

“So, what are the alternatives,” you might ask (I said I’d come back to that), and rightly so. If someone’s going to criticize policy, they should have a solution that’s better than the one they’re criticizing, right? Otherwise, they’re just a whiner. Okay, fine. So, here’s a better solution to solving the health care “crisis” than socialized health care and rationing, which we have determined is, arguably, unconstitutional.

How about fostering competition by letting consumers in one state buy coverage offered in other states? In a recent article, Steve Chapman wrote:

“If WellPoint has more than half the business in Indiana, why not let Indiana residents or companies go to California or Minnesota to see if they can find options that are cheaper or better?

But the administration and its allies show no interest in removing that particular barrier to competition. Maybe that’s because it would reduce the power of state regulators to boss insurance companies around.

Nor does Obama believe in fostering competition in other health insurance realms — such as existing government health insurance programs. John Goodman, head of the National Center for Policy Analysis, suggests letting Americans now enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) select a voucher to buy private coverage if they want. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the administration to push that idea.”

Interesting. “It would reduce the power of state regulators to boss insurance companies around.” So, it’s about power. It seems that so much of what President Obama wants to do – and has done in hitherto, in his first term – boils down to a massive power grab. The government now effectively controls AIG, and GM, and now they’re pushing a public health care “option” that will bankrupt the health insurance industry, all the while, the New York Times tries to convince us that “‘rationing’ has become a dirty word.” Mr. Singer, rationing hasn’t “become” a dirty word; it is a dirty word, when it comes to health care. It is, and always has been and always should be. Even President Obama impliedly admits this, according to Mr. Singer who, in the aforementioned article wrote, “Meeting last month with five governors, President Obama urged them to avoid using the term [rationing], apparently for fear of evoking the hostile response that sank the Clintons’ attempt to achieve reform.”

This manipulation of language is smoke and mirrors to try to trick the public into buying into something they have known, instinctively, for generations is a bad idea. Ask yourself, my fellow Americans, if you want some bureaucrat deciding what even one moment of your life is worth. If the answer is, “No,” you do not believe in rationing, and by extension, you do not believe in socialized health care! Call your Senators and Congressmen, and tell them that, if they vote for socialized health care, you will vote against them in the next election!