It is telling that the current healthcare debate is framed in terms of what will or will not be good for certain “groups” of people in society and not for individuals.
Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma), a physician, wrote an excellent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal today that provides a specific example of how health care reform in its current form will effect individuals.
You can read it here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703514404574588842779569168.html
In another case, about a month ago the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force announced that women under 50 didn’t need to get regular mammograms.
The panel admitted that regular mammogram testing for women under 50 reduced their risk of dying by 15%. [1]
However, the panel “decided” that “when weighed against the risks of screening — false positives, additional biopsies and patient anxiety — the relative benefit was too small to recommend screening in younger women.”
Isn’t that a decision each women under 50 should make for herself?
Would you want your mother, your wife, your sister, or your child to forgo getting a mammogram based this panel’s cost/benefit analysis?
I highly doubt it.
Sure, as a group overall costs may be lower but the costs for any one particular individual could be very high: she may be part of that 15% that dies early because she didn’t get regular mammograms in her 40s.
And odds are any particular woman under 40 won’t know if she’s an exception to the panel’s rule until it’s too late.
It’s one thing if a woman under 40 chooses not to get regular mammograms.
It’s quite another thing for the decision to be made, or even a recommendation offered, by any group of people who know nothing about the particular person in question.
Society is nothing more than the individuals who compose it.
The proper analytical frame of reference for most, if not all, policy decisions in a free society is the individual, not the “group” or “collective.”
This is especially true when proposing legislation that will effect how you and I access and use medical goods and services.
Personally, I would rather have the option to borrow whatever money I needed and yes, possibly go bankrupt, to get access to medical care that could save my life than live in a country where I was guaranteed basic coverage but more costly decisions were decided by generalized government cost/benefit calculations.
Apparently so do more and more Canadians: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574443253009607932.html
No matter what you may think about health-care reform I urge you to think about how these reforms will effect you; not what they will do for “society.”
There is no free lunch: it is economically impossible for all types of medical care to be guaranteed to every single American.
We can either choose to live in a country where individuals have the right to make their own choices about what they are or are not willing to do and/or pay to get the medical care they need, messy as this reality is.
Or we can choose to create a system where everyone is guaranteed a basic level of coverage but no one (except maybe the powerful and politically connected) is free to make expensive medical decisions on their own.
Is there some middle ground between these two options?
Maybe.
But I highly doubt that 2,000+ page bill in the Senate right now will attain it.
