Advocate of Legalized Infanticide: Let's Ration Health Care

It came as no big surprise to me when I noticed who wrote this NYT Op-Ed "Why We Must Ration Health Care" -- philosopher Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton. Singer is notorious for his positions on the legalization of infanticide and euthanasia, and applies an exacting utilitarian standard to his work.

I guess they passed on that driving safety piece by Ted Kennedy.

Both sides in the debate about the Democrats' risky scheme (don't call it "reform") for heath insurance are guilty of cherry picking individual cases. Singer is no different, and he sets up a doozey. He picks Sutent, a particularly expensive drug prolonging the lives of terminal kidney cancer patients by about six months, costing $54,000.:

If you can afford it, you probably would pay that much, or more, to live longer, even if your quality of life wasn’t going to be good. But suppose it’s not you with the cancer but a stranger covered by your health-insurance fund. If the insurer provides this man — and everyone else like him — with Sutent, your premiums will increase. Do you still think the drug is a good value? Suppose the treatment cost a million dollars. Would it be worth it then? Ten million? Is there any limit to how much you would want your insurer to pay for a drug that adds six months to someone’s life? 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.

Of course, health care is already rationed by this hybrid private-public system we've grown to hate. But in a market system, the individual makes a meta-decision about the value of such treatments and purchases his plan accordingly.

Rationing health care means getting value for the billions we are spending by setting limits on which treatments should be paid for from the public purse. If we ration we won’t be writing blank checks to pharmaceutical companies for their patented drugs, nor paying for whatever procedures doctors choose to recommend. When public funds subsidize health care or provide it directly, it is crazy not to try to get value for money. The debate over health care reform in the United States should start from the premise that some form of health care rationing is both inescapable and desirable.

Or, how about we just not do it at all. Why are we in the position of choosing between blank checks and rationing? Because the statists insist that the government get involved.

At least Singer has done us the favor of laying out the gory logical conclusion of Obamacare.
More nonsense:

[W]e should remind ourselves that the U.S. system also results in people going without life-saving treatment — it just does so less visibly. Pharmaceutical manufacturers often charge much more for drugs in the United States than they charge for the same drugs in Britain, where they know that a higher price would put the drug outside the cost-effectiveness limits set by NICE. American patients, even if they are covered by Medicare or Medicaid, often cannot afford the copayments for drugs. That’s rationing too, by ability to pay.

So let me get this straight -- Pharma companies have to subsidize the socialist system with discounted drugs, then they push the burden on to the paying private system. Therefore, we should socialize more of our own system??? Is it not then the logical conclusion that private care would be squeezed even more by this state induced price discrimination?

More straw men:

Dr. Art Kellermann, associate dean for public policy at Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta, recently wrote of a woman who came into his emergency room in critical condition because a blood vessel had burst in her brain. She was uninsured and had chosen to buy food for her children instead of spending money on her blood-pressure medicine. In the emergency room, she received excellent high-tech medical care, but by the time she got there, it was too late to save her.

Generic blood pressure medicine is actually quite cheap and in many cases just as effective as on-patent drugs. Surely there was some way for this woman to have received her meds short of a risky government scheme for health insurance, probably from some existing government program, or even a private aid program.

The bottom line is that the middle class is going to feel the negative effects of Obamacare most acutely. The rich will be able to pay for the exorbitant cost of private care, the poor and uninsured will get their welfare health care, and the middle class will be unable to reach up to the upper tier for select care because it will be priced entirely too far out of reach.

Posted by: JoeCollins at 06:02 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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