A Rose if a Rose

While we Twitter the days away or engage in similar amusements, our elected representatives are working very hard to assume an ever increasing degree of control over our every day lives. Currently, the most critical issue at risk is our loss of control over our own health care services.
At every level, the government in this country has a miserable record of running (controlling) anything. Medicare and social security are failures. Public assistance programs consume public funds like chaff in a powerful wind while the leadership gives lip service to “closing the loopholes” that never go away. Now, the United States government wants to provide health care for everyone. But the underlying truth is that it’s not about providing a much needed improved health care system, it’s about control. If you control health care you can ration it. In fact, if the government provides health care for “everyone” it will have to ration it out of sheer necessity. Much like the way it’s currently rationed in Canada and the UK.
The most vivid indicator of this probability is the current rationing of a vaccine to protect against the H1N1 virus. According to a 2006 study by the American Journal of Epidemiology, an average of over 41,000 Americans die from common strains of influenza each year (data collected between 1997 and 2001). But the government tells us that the H1N1 strain is not your typical influenza strain - it’s a “pandemic” of a much more powerful and incredibly more dangerous virus that is expected to infect between sixty and ninety million Americans (statistical extraction from data attributed to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology) this flu season. But there isn’t enough vaccine to go around. Now what? Well, we ration it. Certain groups of people, based upon statistical probabilities of which groups are likely to experience the highest level of terminal infection from this virus, will receive access to the vaccine before anyone else. Those who are not among the statistically high risk group population will either go without the vaccine or gain access to it at some future date, depending on its availability.
That, my friend, is rationing. You can slice it with the grain or across the grain; it’s still rationing. When the government controls health care, it’ll be rationed. That’s because, without rationing, a government run “health care for all” system will bankrupt this country.