A Good Start, but...

Reader comment on: Nationalized Health Care Threatens America's Future

Submitted by Thomas Davidson (United States), May 28, 2009 17:22

Mr. Baehr's points are sound and well-taken, but they seem excessively concentrated on the wrong end of the health care market. The fiscal and economic crisis center on the population age 65 and over, whose health care is already socialized and will remain so. The plight of the uninsured -- while sometimes heartbreaking -- is not the core of the problem.

What is driving the Medicare and Medicaid programs into bankruptcy is precisely the inability or unwillingness of the government to ration services. Mr. Baehr correctly points out that other socialized systems accept such rationing. Only the Americans do not. The debate has to begin and end with a calculation of the costs and benefits of providing costly drugs, implants, and other drivers of health care costs to patients who cannot benefit from them.

Tom

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