No, it is not a new MTV reality series, (although it could be some day in the future) rather it is the subject of Mark Steyn’s column this week over at The Orange County Register. Not Barack Obama personally unplugging grandma from life support, mind you. No, it is about how difficult it will be to get grandma plugged in in the first place under the mandatory rationing that ObamaCare will entail.
The problem with government health systems is not that they pull the plug on Grandma. It’s that Grandma has a hell of a time getting plugged in in the first place. The only way to “control costs” is to restrict access to treatment, and the easiest people to deny treatment to are the oldsters. Don’t worry, it’s all very scientific. In Britain, they use a “Quality-Adjusted Life Year” formula to decide that you don’t really need that new knee because you’re gonna die in a year or two, maybe a decade-and-a-half tops. So it’s in the national interest for you to go around hobbling in pain rather than divert “finite resources” away from productive members of society to a useless old geezer like you. And you’d be surprised how quickly geezerdom kicks in: A couple of years back, some Quebec facilities were attributing death from hospital-contracted infection of anyone over 55 to “old age.” Well, he had a good innings. He was 57.
This ought to be of particular concern to Americans. As is often pointed out, U.S. life expectancy (78.06 years) lags behind other developed nations with government health care (United Kingdom 78.7, Germany 78.95, Sweden 80.63). So proponents of Obamacare are all but offering an extra “full year” of Euro-Canadian geriatric leisure as a signing bonus.
“Life expectancy” is a very crude indicator. Afghanistan has a life expectancy of 43. Does this mean the geriatric wards of Kandahar are full of Pushtun Jennifer Lopezes and Julia Robertses? No. What it means is that, if you manage to survive the country’s appalling infant-mortality rates, you have a sporting chance of eking out your three-score-and-ten. To say that people in Afghanistan can expect to live till 43 is a bit like saying the couple at No. 6 Elm Street are straight, and the couple at No. 8 are gay so the entire street is bisexual.
Please read the whole thing. Steyn tells an anecdote that should make you think – hard – about the difference between health “care” and health treatment. And there is a huge difference.
Obama has personally endorsed the idea of limiting treatments to the old – regardless of the publicity barrage coordinated by the White House and carried out by the subservient media and the left wing blogs. There will be government rationing of health care under ObamaCare. It is, as Steyn points out, the only way to control costs in a nationalized health care system. That is exactly what ObamaCare is meant to usher in, folks. No matter how much they protest otherwise.
