Do you want Ted Kennedy making medical decisions? (Score 1)

I can reduce the above screed to 7 words: "Ration medical care according to Bios_Hakr's priorities." Proponents of a monolithic health care financing system think they are getting all impure motivations out of the system, but all they're doing is shifting them around. If you replace our current system with a government-run single-payer system, the critical decisions about whether some service that an individual wants is worth having the entire society pay for don't go away--they merely get shifted to the government. We've already seen this with Medicare. Ultimately, high-stakes medical decisions, like coverage for expensive new technologies, become political questions, and get made by people like Ted Kennedy (Democratic senator from Massachusetts) and Ted Stevens (Republican senator from Alaska). And those decisions are going to be subject to the same conflicting interests every other decision made in Washington faces. It will actually introduce new conflicts and motives into the system--just like decisions about locating military bases and other government facilities depend on how many people and companies from which states will benefit. While you'd like for these decisions to be made purely on clinical evidence (my line of work), they really get made on the basis of a mixture of clinical evidence and lobbying power, even stuff like who was the college roommate of an inflluential senator. There is no health care financing system in the world that does not ration care one way or another, not even ours. Some systems hide the rationing better than others. The American system has less rationing than other systems, but in exchange we have the problem of the uninsured. Most of the systems people hold up as models ration care either by restricting the diffusion of new technologies or by queuing Canada has the purest system of keeping equal access to health care services, but that comes in exchange for some of the worst queuing problems and the greatest restrictions on people's freedom of choice.(*) People in Canada die as the result of having to wait for a necessary medical service like a diagnostic MRI, because the government wants to control health care costs. That's great if you want to punish rich people for wanting better health care than the rest of us, but that's a rather stiff price to pay. Most countries (such as the UK and those in Europe) don't want to create those conflicts, so they allow a two-tiered system with some private service for those willing to pay out of their own pocket. In Canada, you don't have that (#), so you get stories of people being able to schedule next-day cancer surgery for their dog while waiting months for their own surgery. To borrow a phrase, the US health care financing system is the worst system in the world except for every other one. If time permits, I'll follow up with some further takedown of the post. Matt Mitchell Diagnostic Research Design & Reporting *--Any time you create an entitlement for one person to take another person's property, no matter how noble the cause, there's going to have to be some control on that entitlement, or else the entire concept of private property is worthless and the producers will stop producing. #--Though a recent court case may overturn that ban.