Two Unspoken Future Consequences of Universal Healthcare

I wrote recently, here, about the coming Democratic legislative assault on private sector healthcare. As I discussed the post with a friend today, I realized that two important aspects of the debate have been missing so far.

They are, of course, state-directed abortions and euthanasia.

Let me explain.

Once all healthcare is insured/provided by the government, all ability to de-politicize the use of scarce medical resources be gone. Elected officials will appoint the overseers of the program, and those overseers will become the allocators of healthcare dollars and resources.

How long will it be before those overseers note that some births will be more problematic, using more resources, than others? Or that, given genetic information from pre-natal testing, some babies may be born with a higher probability for disease or expensive medical conditions?

Because the healthcare system will have become focused on allocation, rather than an individual's choice for his/her own healthcare, there will be no defense against these developments.

Expect the same at the other end of the age spectrum- euthanasia of the old. It will occur by weighing the expected contribution of older people to society, versus what we all know to be increasingly-expensive late-life and -disease care.

Ironically, a party that thinks it is for the individual, the "little guy," the liberal Democrats, will, in the end, create and operate the machinery for treating individuals as consumers of societal resources, to be denied those resources when deemed too expensive, individual desires be damned.

Will this not be the ultimate intrusion of the state into personal life? Of course.

This is the logical endpoint of the much-desired liberal single-payer healthcare system. Control over who is born, and who dies when.