Singer's Deadly Tune

Singer's Deadly Tune: The Right (and Wrong) Way To Ration Health Care | Raymond Dennehy

Peter Singer's recent op-ed piece in The New York Times, "Why We Must Ration Health Care," (August 2, 2009) is timely, all the more so since the Congressional Budget Office now estimates that President Barack Obama's health care plan will cost $1.5 trillion more than the White House estimate. Singer notes that in the debate over health care reform, "rationing" has become a dirty word. His essay doesn't attempt to tidy the word up, but only to persuade readers that health care reform is the only solution to the nation's health care problems and that you can't have successful reform without rationing.

Singer's approach here is not his classic vintage. There's no advocacy, let alone mention, of procedures, such as infant euthanasia, that have made his name a national brand for academically sponsored evil. But just as the "Lite" version of a beverage can be as harmful as the "Classic" version, we would be rash to assume that "Singer Lite" is healthier for America than "Singer Classic."

Singer argues that all scarce resources are "rationed in one way or another," and health care is a scarce resource. If your health care plan is privately financed, which it usually is, we're talking about "rationing by price," since the plan we have depends on what we or our employer can afford to pay. And in the case of Medicare, Medicaid and hospital emergency rooms, "health care is rationed by long waits, high patient copayment requirements, low payments to doctors that discourage some from serving public patients and limits on payments to hospitals."

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Comments

[Telemachus]

Excellent article. Just a thought:

Many (perhaps most) intellectuals have put their "talents" to the service of Evil, from the proponents of socialism and other collectivist tyrannies during the past two centuries, on up to people like Singer and his fellow death-utilitarians. These intellectuals have always had much more influence with the ruling classes than the mass-majority of citizens, and by necessity: it's nearly impossible to corral the masses alone, but one can use the power of the State to do so quite easily. You need only make the right friends.

For any Catholic who reads this blog but sympathizes with socialized health-care (notwidthstanding all of the nuances in names and principles of various proposals: they're all the same in terms of final results), I ask that you simply think of what such a system would allow people like Singer to do. In a private health-care market, one at least has the options of accepting or not accepting a given "provider," and if he doesn't t like this provider, he would have recourse to choose another or start his own if he felt enterprising. But a socialized system necessarily pushes out private options out of the reach of customers, or places them under the ultimate provider of the State, and the State is easily controlled by evil men.

Health-care, like any other good or service, will inevitably be rationed, but we have a choice by what means this is accomplished. In a private market, health-care is rationed by reality, and the ability to afford treatment is up to the myriad options at one's disposal. In contrast, with publicly-administered health-care is rationed by politics, and one must fight his fellow man for treatment or against evil policies. If a unified, government-managed health-care system comes about in the United States, this nation will surely make the final transition into a fully anti-life society. Peter Singer, et al. will see to it.