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Annals of Government Medicine - John Hinderaker
An investigation reveals that under socialized medicine in the U.K., the death panel process has been delegated to hospital staff who designate patients “do not resuscitate” without the knowledge of the patient or his family and occasionally through clerical error:
Elderly patients are being condemned to an early death by hospitals making secret use of “do not resuscitate” orders, an investigation has found.
The Reality of Death Panels - Mike Stopa
SUPPORTERS OF President Obama’s health care reform law have relentlessly derided Sarah Palin’s notion of “death panels’’ as a vulgar rhetorical technique, with no basis in reality, devised merely to scare a gullible, uneducated citizenry into rallying to repeal the law. The death panel notion persists, however, because it denotes, in a pithy way, the economic realities of scarcity inherent in nationalizing a rapidly developing, high-technology industry on which people’s lives depend in a rather immediate way. G.K. Chesterton once wrote that vulgar notions (and jokes) invariably contain a “subtle and spiritual idea.’’ The subtle and spiritual idea behind “death panels’’ is that life-prolonging medical technology is an expensive, limited commodity and if the market doesn’t determine who gets it, someone else will.
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To the extent that ObamaCare ultimately succeeds in imposing uniformity on basic health care, it will likely lead to the creation of secondary markets for providing insurance against various health eventualities and access to “heroic’’ procedures to extend life. Water runs downhill and it’s a good thing that it does. First, we need to have people buy the expensive medicines and experimental technologies. Europe has discovered this as its regulated system of medicine has driven its pharmaceutical industry farther and farther behind that of the United States. Capping costs kills innovation.
But, in addition, Palin is right. Death panels are an inevitable consequence of socialized medicine. The law of scarcity demands them.
A mature discussion of health care must recognize basic economics so that we can think ahead on how to satisfy the demands of those who are not satisfied with base-level care.
