When it comes to the most flagrant forms of officially sanctioned hypocrisy in this country, it’s hard to beat the blather about health care rationing. The very word “rationing” in this context brings down howls of sanctimonious denial from officialdom. When Arizona recently refused to fund some heart transplants for financial reasons, the action was loudly decried as a terrible aberration. It wasn’t. It was merely a high-profile example at the state level of the same sort of cost-based rationing that millions of individual Americans are now forced to impose on themselves.
In the workplace a growing number of employers are offering health insurance policies with fewer things covered and/or shifting an ever greater share of monthly premium costs to their employees. Those still employed thus have the choice of paying more to visit a doctor or hospital, or doing without needed health care. With higher wages not picking up this extra expense, many people do without — a cost-based, self-imposed rationing.
If the self-employed can still get health coverage at all, it is bare-boned and pricey. So more and more in this group ration themselves for lack of a resources alternative.
Higher co-pays and larger deductibles are other reasons why health care rationing in this country has taken hold. Your out-of-pocket to see a primary physician may now be $25 instead of $10, to see a specialist $45 instead of $25, so you don’t go because that extra cost bites into your food budget or your monthly car payment. You ration yourself. You don’t get the drugs you need because you may have to pay the first $500 annual deductible.
There’s even rationing in emergency rooms, the primary care facilities for so many poor Americans. These facilities are now often as crowded as rush hour buses. The waits are achingly long. Avoiding such day-long waits is imposing its own convenience-based health care rationing on people who simply can’t spare the time for anything that doesn’t appear life-threatening.
Will the new health care law that’s gradually coming into effect reduce this creeping rationing? No it won’t. In fact, to a great extent, it’s designed to promote more rationing by individuals as a cost containment mechanism for the government.
I’m sick of the lies. The distortions of reality emanating from the Beltway and blithely passed along by the media. Lies about a crushing austerity that’s billed as a recovery. Lies about a non-existent core rate inflation when core life inflation is soaring. And the sanctimonious lies about there being no health care rationing when such rationing touches so many lives so painfully.
Like austerity-cum-recovery, like core-inflation-cum-no-inflation, real world health care rationing has been renamed. It is now billed “giving individuals more responsibility for their own health care costs” — as if real individual responsibility in this realm involved not treating problems early and expecting this to lead to long-term savings and better medical outcomes.
I can handle the truth. I believe most Americans can. Truth that might make us sad, frightens us even, because when we hear it we know we can trust the truth-tellers and believe them when they say they have plans to make things better. Today’s Beltway and media pablum peddlers, as self-deceived as they are deceitful, offer no real hope for a better future.
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