Rationing Begins in the Healthcare Bill...

Does this sound like the hopey-changey stuff we were promised?

You're afraid your cancer is back, and a health insurance company just turned you down.
Under the health care bills in Congress, you could apply for coverage through a new high-risk pool that President Barack Obama promises would immediately start serving patients with pre-existing medical problems.

Wait a second. Read the fine print. You may have to be uninsured for six months to qualify.

"If you are a cancer patient and have cancer now, you can't wait six months to go into a plan because your condition can go from bad to death," said Stephen Finan, a policy expert with the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. He called the waiting period in the Senate bill "unacceptable."

Advocates for people with serious health problems, as well as some insurance experts, are raising questions about one of the most important upfront benefits in the Democratic health care legislation: a high-risk pool for the medically uninsurable.

Socialist healthcare necessarily means rationed healthcare.  This is such a simple and unassailable fact, but so many people don't understand it, or don't want to believe it.

The reality is this: if all the people of this country were entitled (by law) to all healthcare services, there would be more demand for healthcare than there was supply.  Nobody is proposing changing that by radically increasing supply (depending on whose estimate you believe, increasing supply to meet unconstrained demand would require somewhere between a 175% and a 450% increase in healthcare capacity, most of which would be unused most of the time).  Human society has only ever come up with two fundamental ways to “manage” such a supply/demand mismatch.

One way is by government dictat, as socialized medicine would be.  In that sort of a system, political bureaucrats use the criteria important to them (e.g., getting re-elected) to decide how much supply there should be, and then those same bureaucrats decide how to ration the limited supply to meet the much larger demand.  That's Sarah Palin's death panels, the Senate bill's waiting period, etc., etc.

The other way is by market forces.  The amount of supply is determined by our collective willingness to pay.  What healthcare you have access to is determined by what you or your employer is willing to pay, which in turn depends on what kind of a job you have and how much society values your work.  Thus as a software engineer, I probably have access to better healthcare than the guy sweeping out the offices at our local retail nursery.  There may also be a “safety net” healthcare plan, as we have today in the U.S., that provides basic healthcare for everybody.

Both of these ways provide a way to allocate scarce healthcare resources to a much larger demand.  I know which one I prefer.  How about you?