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Rationing Health Care
Is it bad, or can it be good, or even if it’s seen as good can it be bad? A great place to start this debate is by reading Ron Beasley HERE.
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4 Responses to “Rationing Health Care”
Here is a good short video on the subject:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqMKK8AoLCw&eurl…
Rationing is a reality we live with now. You're always going to be limited by your own money and the money provided by your insurance. Nothing about that is going to change or can change.
Rationing is necessary to contain costs. I don't necessarily see a difference whether an insurance company or a government is doing the rationing as both will have an incentive to contain costs.
In order for the inevitable rationing to work expectations have to change. Although Obama has touched on that a bit it's the third rail of health care reform. We can't absorb the millions of uninsured and still keep Grandma alive for an extra week for $50,000. This will also mean that people who have 50K in their pocket might spend it to keep Grandma alive, which is certainly their right, but there will be inequality of care and people will have to accept that as well.
These are very hard decisions that Medicare has not addressed – typically they have controlled costs mainly by keeping payments low but in general have done a poor job regulating procedures and futile care.
You'll see it eventually once government medical costs become unsustainable. (Government has far more power than the Evil Insurance Companies.) Already we have some hospitals that have ethics boards, because the rationing and withholding of care in the case of “futility” (the key concept here) has already been put into practice, not simply been a subject for years of academic or intellectual interest.