Much of the argument of healthcare reform focuses on the concern that universal healthcare will lead to "healthcare rationing" with government bureacrats deciding who gets care for what and who doesn't. But we have healthcare rationing now, in a sense, and it often leads to inefficiencies and high costs in our system.
Yesterday I heard this story on NPR.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106168331
I urge everyone to read it and focus on the story of the woman, a working poor mother taking care of her kids, who had to choose between buying her blood pressure medicine and putting food on the table for her kids. When her lack of medicine resulted in a hemorrhagic stroke doctors spent 90 minutes futilely trying to save her life. In that 90 minutes she ran up health care costs that would have more than paid for all her blood pressure meds for life. Her death leaves her children without a mother.
As the article notes "It was not a government bureaucrat who decided she should forgo treatment until it was too late it was her own lack of health insurance that led her to make that choice."
My point will focus on the last 90 minutes of her life when the unsuccessful life saving efforts led to costs far greater than the costs of the medicines that would have made those efforts unnecessary. We ALL paid for those costs. We pay in higher insurance premiums for ourselves as hospitals shift such costs to those who can pay. We pay in the social costs of children raised without a mother and the likely reduced potential of those children in our society.
We ration now. This mother's healthcare was rationed. But was it a rational rationing or a rationing that we all paid much for, and her family paid most? We'd have ALL been better off if this woman had not been rationed out of getting blood pressure medicine. We'd have ALL been better off if government mandated, universal insurance had covered this. We'd have ALL paid less.
"A man never drinks anything that a plant lives in" --DBone (A Real Man).
http://vimeo.com/4938173
