The 'arguments' for Obamacare

Stephanie Gutman:

Try this thought experiment. You are the editors and publishers of the New York Times. You believe you have a sacred trust. It’s not to tell your readers what’s going on in the world. Any moron can do that. No, as the “newspaper of record” your mandate is far loftier: you are here to make your readers better people.

Every day in every way, you are here to persuade them to ride their bicycles to work and to air dry their smalls. They need to open their pocketbooks on cue for programmes like HeadStart; they need to stop grumbling about affirmative action. Mostly, they need to trust in the sometimes mysterious ways of Chairman Obama.

Things had been going pretty well. The Chairman’s approval ratings had been high, but just recently things have gotten a bit rocky. Suddenly ObamaCare - the term pundits have coined for President Obama’s plan for a total overhaul of the US health care system in which everyone gets whatever they want whenever they want without any new costs to anyone (expect those distant baddies known as “the wealthiest Americans”) - is not moving smoothly toward passage by Congress.

It seems - who would have thought! - that there is no easy way to bring comprehensive affordable health care to every single American (and many non-Americans like illegal immigrants) without new taxes or cuts to government-funded programmes like Medicaid (which serves the elderly) or Medicaid (for the poor).

Sensing weakness, the baddies over at Right-wing talk radio and the Wall Street Journal have begun to spread ugly rumours of the coming “European-style” rationing. They’re painting vivid pictures of waiting lists, of committees, of standing-in-line-to turn in an application to petition authorities to be alloted a mammogram. (Which is actually something that happened to a relative of mine who lives in London.)

Americans do not like this sort of thing at all.

Last week the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page let slip its most vicious dog of war so far. Its editorial “Of NICE and Men” introduced Americans to the inner workings of the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) which basically figures out who deserves treatment and who doesn’t by using a cost-utility analysis based on the “quality adjusted life year”.

So what is that and how is it computed? Here is what Doctors Prieto and Sacristan, who studied it, wrote: “The basic idea underlying the QALY is simple: it assumes that a year of life lived in perfect health is worth 1 QALY (1 Year of Life × 1 Utility = 1 QALY) and that a year of life lived in a state of less than this perfect health is worth less than 1.”

Deductions are taken for blindness, for being in a wheelchair and so on. But who’s to say that one wheelchair-bound person’s quality of life is necessarily so much worse than the life of someone who isn’t in a wheelchair? By this formula Stephen Hawking would have been euthanised years ago.

Nearly every expert agrees that ObamaCare will have to involve rationing - genteelly masked in pseudo-scientific trappings like the Quality of Life Year algorithm. The problem is getting spoiled, willful Americans to accept the idea of self-sacrifice for the collective good - of passing on that hip replacement, for instance, so that the young mother in the inner city can have better pre-natal care.

...

So stop sniffling, Americans. If you must die earlier under ObamaCare, the Times will be on hand to write a glowing profile.

There is much more between the ...s.

All of this sacrifice for the uninsured comes a cropper when you get past the empathy brigades and focus on the demographic. As many as a third to a half of the uninsured are in the country illegally. Back when the Times and others were pushing for "comprehensive" immigration reform, they were using 20 million as the number of people in the country illegally. Most are believed to have no health care coverage.

That is about half of the 40 million who are said to have no health care. If the Democrats were to confess these numbers they would probably lose the battle on health care and immigration reform. Most Americans would ask why they should make that kind of sacrifice for so many who came here illegally.

But even if the illegals were excluded the sacrifices that are being asked are far different from what Obama has been saying about being able to continue with your current health care. BTW, don't empathy out on the illegals, they are getting their health care at the emergency room. I really don't have a problem with treating someone with an emergency, but I think they should also be turned over to ICE after they get treatment.