Tag: socialized medicine

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general freedom too much government

No Transplants for the Unvaxxed

organ transplant, socialized medicine, Covid

Because of a rare but dangerous side effect, heart inflammation, Scandinavian countries are now discouraging the use of the Moderna vaccine in younger people.

We’ve seen other reports of severe illness and even death because of, or at least soon after, COVID-19 vaccinations. But we’re assured that serious side effects are so rare and the vaccines so effective that the wisdom of getting vaccinated is self-evident.

But what’s more evident? They’re forcing you. 

If you’re “vaccine-hesitant” for any reason — even if you’ve already got immunity because of a COVID-19 infection — too bad. A public-private partnership to mandate vaccination is already costing many people their jobs.

Now it’s costing people a chance for a kidney.

So ordains University of Colorado Hospital, whose Kidney Transplant Coordinator, Katie Harmann, tells Leilani Lutali that she “will be removed from the kidney transplant list” until she is vaccinated.

Note that the opportunity is not being withdrawn because the prospective recipient is sick with COVID-19 and therefore is about to kick the bucket anyway. The hospital is treating the patient’s assessment of her own risk as irrelevant.

Lutali says, “I feel like I’m being coerced into not being able to wait and see [whether the vaccine is the right thing to do], and that I have to take the shot if I want this life-saving transplant.”

This is the reality of rationed care in a largely socialist medical system.

And this is what Democrats lust for, even demand; and it is what they are working mightily to ensure — that our current messy, mixed healthcare system will soon become even more bureaucratic and restrictive.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy responsibility too much government

UK Death Panel

healthcare, socialism, rationing, government

Six days ago, the European Court of Human Rights sided against the parents of Charlie Gard, a severely ill boy, refusing to allow them to take their infant son to America where he could receive full (and privately funded) experimental treatment. The court ruled that removing the child from the hospital would cause him “significant harm” — and authorized the termination of life support.

Yesterday, this site quoted Ben Shapiro on the case. Shapiro sees this sad story as a grand demonstration of what is wrong with government-funded and -managed health care:

Bernie Sanders tweets about how nobody should be denied care because they can’t afford it? But that’s what happens all the time under socialized medicine — the difference being, it’s not about you not being able to afford it, it is about the government not being able to afford it.

Economists tell us that, in a world of scarcity, there will be rationing, willy nilly: either by price (according to consumer and producer choices) or else by government diktat.

Last week, the European Court of Human Rights did its due diligence to ration resources — serving as a Death Panel.

The scheduled to pull the plug on Charlie last Friday, but there’s been a last-minute reprieve — no doubt a result of pressure from America and the Vatican.

Though the doctor who testified before the court insisted that any American medical institution would have provided the treatment he offers, the best the Gards can apparently hope for, now, is to be allowed to take Charlie home to die.

Think of it as socialized medicine in action.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Panel Decides “Death”

The practice of medicine historically straddled between being a business profession and a charitable endeavor. When government took it over — nearly in one big gulp, in Great Britain— that uneasy mix mutated, leaving us with the occasional bout of stark horror.

A British woman suffering from cystic fibrosis has been denied a new wonder drug that the manufacturer has agreed to provide for free, while the National Health Service gets around to approving it. But NHS says no.

Her family say she will die soon without it, yet managers at Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham say it would be unethical to provide the drug under the deal, only for it to be withdrawn later.

The drug, Kalydeco also known as ivacaftor, costs £182,000 per patient per year, and works for five per cent of people with CF who have a certain defective gene, around 270 people in England.

It corrects a malfunctioning protein which causes the characteristic build-up of fluid and mucus in the lungs that causes devastating damage.

A long shot, apparently. But is that any reason to deny a charitable offer?

These kinds of deals get offered and accepted in America all the time.

But then, when a private insurance company here decides not to cover some drug or treatment, that’s an excuse to excoriate American capitalism — while forgetting about all the characteristically American workarounds. But in “single-payer” Britain we see the state acting as a proverbial “death panel.” The outcry against socialism should be just as loud, if not louder.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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too much government

Killing Them Softly

You probably associate methadone with heroin recovery clinics. Now it’s associated with state-run medicine. And iatrogenic fatalities.

Washington State’s “Washington Rx” is a medical assistance program that’s been in operation less than a decade, providing a drug discount card to those with low incomes and regulating prescriptions for Medicaid patients. The biggest challenge? Rising prescription drug prices — which places many drugs out of reach of poor and non-insured folks, and jeopardizes state finances with a financial hole to suck up ever-increasing amounts of money.

How to economize?

The board responsible for Washington Rx policy has pushed cheaper drugs. For pain medication, effective but expensive drugs like Oxycodone were swapped out for that old synthetic opioid, methadone, which is ultra-cheap. This saved the state millions.

Reasonable, eh?

Well, the problem with methadone is that it’s hard to control dose. The drug lingers in the body, builds up. It turns out to be rather easy to pass away during sleep of an accidental overdose. “Doctors,” a fascinating Seattle Times report informs us, “call it the silent death.”

Methadone overdose rates have radically increased in the Evergreen State, especially in poorer communities. Since Washington Rx set up shop, 2,173 Washingtonians have died of methadone overdose; an overwhelming majority of all overdose cases are from this one drug.

Programs in other states also list methadone as a preferred drug, and methadone overdoses are on the rise nationwide.

We are often told of the horrors of private insurers and their dastardly cost-cutting practices. But here’s a bureaucracy cutting costs. And effectively, too.

With a side-effect: killing people.

That’s hardly Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Competition Works Even With Limited Info

Few of us understand all our options when we shop for homeowners’ insurance.

The New York Times’s Paul Krugman riffed on this, arguing that “When people call for ‘consumer choice’ in health care, what this mainly comes down to isn’t comparison shopping on actual care . . . but rather comparison shopping on insurance policies. And that’s basically impossible even for home insurance, which is a lot simpler than medical insurance.”

Krugman calls a free market in medical insurance “fantasy.”

Yet the illusions involved in buying insurance also apply to non-market medical coverage.

Consider: Most people with low-price insurance like their coverage at least so long as they don’t have to make many claims against it. That’s because insurance is one of those things you buy hoping not to have an occasion to require it.

Something similar happens in single-payer medicine. Some Europeans (especially the young and healthy) praise their state systems that cost them next to nothing out of pocket, patching up their scrapes, mending their bones “for free.”

But wait till they are old and really sick, and on a multiple-month waiting list for an MRI or cancer treatment. Rationing-by-waiting can be a killer.

Bottom-line this: In a competitive insurance market, on learning of poor performance by your carrier, you can drop your insurer like a hot potato. In single-payer systems, you’re stuck. In line. Hoping not to get something too taxing on the system.

But you do have a choice in coffins.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

Fine-Tuning the Shackles

Loathe handcuffs and leg irons? No problem. We’ll adjust the restraints slightly. Shave a gram off the weight. Paint them a new color. And throw away the key.

Feel liberated?

Nobody in a chain gang would be fooled.

But the Obama Administration expects phony “concessions” in the implementation of last year’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare,” for short) to be treated as a sign of generous and reasonable compromise. The president supports an amendment to the health care law that, according to the New York Times, would “allow states to opt out of its most burdensome requirements three years earlier than currently permitted.”

If you dislike the program’s taxes and mandates, which after all constitute Obamacare’s most burdensome requirements, you’d approve. Right? All we need do is move in 2014 to some state that has opted out . . .

Not so fast. The state programs would have to cover just as many people and be just as “comprehensive and affordable” as the federal program. How to do this except by forcing people to participate?

The amended legislation would also allow states to establish single-payer systems in which the state government is the only insurer of health care. Compromise?

As Michael Cannon observes, “President Obama’s move is not about giving states more flexibility. It’s about moving the nation even faster toward his ideal of a Canadian- or British-style single-payer health-care system.” Which is where Obama and many Democrats have been hankering to go all along.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

An Ideological Cure?

Sometimes doctors need a stiff belt of medicine too.

Scot Echols, a  reader of Glenn Reynolds’s “Instapundit” blog, wrote in to say that while he appreciated a recent piece by Reynolds hailing capitalism, he thought it had not sufficiently stressed how capitalism fosters the creation of value.

“Value is created when someone does something for [others] better, faster, or cheaper than they can do it themselves,” Echols wrote. Then he related an anecdote about his doctor, whom he had gone to see about a sore throat. His doctor ranted about how “we need communism or a benevolent dictator to solve all of society’s problems.”

Sore throat notwithstanding, Echols responded, saying that he could either treat a sore throat himself with a regimen of gargling and garlic or pay $80 for a consultation and quick-acting antibiotics, reducing a two-week treatment to twenty minutes. His doctor’s knowledge and ability thus create value for him, value worth paying for. Because of such value creation, physicians gain wealth that enables them to drive nicer cars and live in nicer places than many of their receptionists can.

His doctor had no reply, but perhaps did understand a little better just how the kind of value-killing society he’d been dreaming about might not allow him to enjoy the nice things he had now; also, that the freedom to give value and be rewarded for it is a good thing.

Let’s hope the cure sticks. Let’s hope it spreads.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly free trade & free markets too much government

The Alternative to the Public Option

The congressional “progressive” caucus still wants to impose a public health insurance option, allegedly to “reduce the deficit.”

According to caucus kingpin Raul Grijalva, deficit hawks are “hypocrites” for predicting that government spending would balloon were a public option imposed. Their “excuse . . . that it was going to be too expensive is phony,” according to Congressman Grijalva.

The progressives’ notion seems to be that accelerating the pell-mell government takeover of the medical delivery industry is the very best thing one could do to reduce the deficit.

If that’s the case, then why not also “reduce the deficit” with respect to other sectors of the economy in which government spends any money at all — that is, in any economic sector — by launching a government takeover that eventually swamps private markets altogether?

By “progressive” logic, communizing the whole economy must be the best way to foster fiscal sobriety in DC.

Absurd, I know.

Perhaps Grijalva’s deceived by his franking privilege. The public option for postal delivery works so well. For him. For the rest of us, we have to pay the billions the USPS loses every year.

The solution to the USPS’s constant, persistent failure is not to regulate and nationalize Fed-Ex and UPS and every other alternative.

Real progress requires the opposite of Grijalva’s “progressivism”: Pry government out of both health care and postal delivery. This is not a radical idea. It is only . . . well . . .

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Do As I Don’t

Many American politicians decry any attempt to liberalize the market for grade school education. They insist that the public school system must be protected from competition. They hate charter schools, vouchers, tax credits, anything like that.

Yet many of these same politicians send their own kids to private schools.

But simultaneously promoting government-run industry, while choosing private alternatives, isn’t just an education pathology. Consider medicine.

Canadian politicians eager for medical care that really works have made it a habit to travel to the United States to get it. The latest is Danny Williams, premier of the Canadian providence of Newfoundland and Labradour. Williams recently trekked stateside for heart surgery. His office wasn’t releasing many details, but indicated that the surgery isn’t routine.

That explains it. If there’s any chance a life-saving procedure will be tricky, quality is really important.

Williams’s deputy premier, Kathy Dunderdale, told reporters that surgery in the province was never an option. She said: “He is doing what’s best for him.” I’m sure that’s true.

Folks, we can’t, just cannot, further put the American medical industry under government bureaucratic control — that is, make our health care as bad as Canada’s. There’s got to be somewhere for our Canadian friends to go when they really need the good stuff.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

Snappy Put-downs Do Not a Debate Make

There is a political struggle going on over reforming how Americans obtain and pay for medical assistance.

But is there a debate?

Mostly what we hear, instead, are snide put-downs. Gail Collins recently wrote in the New York Times that “members of Congress are getting yelled at about socialized medicine by people who appear to have been sitting in their attics since the anti-tax tea parties, listening for signs of alien aircraft. But on the bright side, they’ve finally got something to distract them from the president’s birth certificate.”

That’s kind of funny. But it doesn’t address anyone’s fear or reasonable suspicion. It’s just more liberal scorn thrown at people who disagree with “big government knows best.”

I’ve heard Rachel Maddow make similar sniping comments. According to her, all folks have against the Democrats’ reform ideas is that Obama wants to kill old people. She laughs. Dismisses it out of hand.

But there are real arguments embedded in such concerns. As I wrote recently on Townhall.com, it’s not that advocates of single-payer medical systems want to kill old people; it’s that, over time, budgetary demands force them to institute some sort of rationing. Older folk die by waiting in week-long, month-long lines for medical assistance in Canada and Great Britain right now.

This is a very real concern. It deserves honest debate, not snappy put-downs and sniping retorts.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.