Re: OT ~ Whose Medical Decisions?: Four Part Series by Thomas Sowell
- From: "JanOrme99@xxxxxxx" <JanOrme99@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2009 09:30:47 -0700 (PDT)
http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2009/08/19/whose_medical_decisions_part_ii?page=full&comments=true
Wednesday, August 19
Who's Medical Decisions? Part 2
by Thomas Sowell
When famed bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he
said: "Because that's where the money is."
For the same reason, it is as predictable as the sunrise that medical
care for the elderly will be cut back under a government-controlled
medical system. Because that's where the money is.
My experience is probably not very different from that of many other
people in their seventies. My medical expenses in the past year have
been more than in the first 40 years of my life-- and I did not spend
one night in a hospital all last year or go to an emergency room even
once.
Just the ordinary medical expenses of keeping an old geezer going
along
in good health are high. Throw in a medical emergency or two and the
costs go through the roof.
So long as my insurance company and I are paying for it, it is nobody
else's business what my medical expenses are. But once the government
is involved, everything is their business.
It is not just a question of what the government will pay for. The
logic of their collectivist thinking-- and the actual practice in some
other countries with government-controlled health care-- is that you
cannot even pay for some medical treatments with your own money, if
the powers that be decide that "society" cannot let its resources be
used that way, or that it would not be "social justice" for some
people to have medical treatments that others cannot get, just because
some people "happen to have money."
The medical care stampede is about much more than medical care,
important as that is. It is part of a whole mindset of many on the
left who have never reconciled themselves to an economic system in
which how much people can withdraw from the resources of the nation
depends on how much they have contributed to those resources.
Despite the cleverness of phrases about people who "happen to have
money," very few people just happen to have money. Most people earned
their money by supplying other people with goods or services that
those people were willing to pay for.
Since it is their own money that they have earned, these people feel
free to spend it to give their 80-year-old grandmother another year or
two of life, or to pay for a hip replacement operation for their mom
or dad, even If some medical "ethicist" might say that the resources
of "society" would be better used to allow some 20-year-old to talk
over his angst with a shrink.
Barack Obama has talked about the high costs of taking care of elderly
or chronically ill patients in terms of "society making those
decisions." But a world in which individuals make their own trade-offs
with their own money is fundamentally different from a world where
third parties take those decisions out of their hands and impose their
own notions of what is best for "society."
Calling these arbitrary notions "ethics" doesn't change anything,
however effective it may be as political spin.
More is at stake than the outcomes of medical decisions, extremely
important as those are. What is also at stake is freedom and the
dignity of individuals who do not live their lives as supplicants of
puffed-up power holders who are spending the money taken from them in
taxes.
One of the many phony arguments for government-controlled medical care
is that Americans do not have any longer life expectancy than in other
countries, despite much higher medical expenditures.
This argument is phony because longevity depends on health-- and
"health care" and "medical care" are not the same, no matter how many
times the two are confused in the media or in politics. Health care
includes things that doctor cannot do much about.
Homicide affects your longevity but there is not much that doctors can
do about it when they arrive on the scene after you have been shot
through the heart, except fill out the paperwork. Rates of homicide,
obesity and narcotics usage are higher here than in many other
countries, reducing our longevity.
But in the things that medical care can do something about-- like
cancer survival rates-- the United States ranks at or near the top in
the world. But that can change if we give up the real benefits of a
top medical system for the visions and rhetoric of politicians.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jan Eric Orme
.
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