Healthcare Rationing

Wednesday's other Wall Street Journal editorial about healthcare, in addition to this one about California's fiscal dilemma with its plan, was one concerning the general nature of universal healthcare plans in other nations.

Essentially, wrote Merrill Matthews, director of the Council for Affordable Health Insurance, and a resident scholar at the Institute for Policy Innovation, the typical experience in other countries is for federal-level governmental management of healthcare to shrink allocations to medical spending, thus 'saving' money, while reducing the availability and quality of healthcare.

Among the evidence cited, Matthews notes that countries such as Canada and France spend 8-10% of GNP, rather than the nearly 16% in the US on healthcare, because such spending becomes a function of political, not consumer demand.

He notes that Federal payments for Medicare have gone down, not up, over time. Currently, Congress is dangling an increase in front of the medical sector, but only if they will back the SCHIP program, which is a back door way of getting Hillary-care operational, beginning with children.

With the government becoming the only payer, rather than one comprising merely a portion of the healthcare market, supply of healthcare will become a function of Congressional budgetary action.

To those of you who don't have an economics background, this means, by definition, healthcare rationing. Because budgetary supply for healthcare will have no obvious relationship to real consumer demand.

Welcome to the world in which your actual health needs will have no impact on the availability of supply of the proper medical services to heal you.