A Sign Of Things To Come: Teetering On The Edge Of Insolvency, Medicare Begins Rationing Health Care
After announcing that the program will plunge into the red this year when expenditures extend beyond revenues, Medicare’s bureaucrats are looking at ways to save money. And what they’ve come up with so far is exactly the sort of thing government health care critics have been warning about for years: rationing.
Because under nationalized health care, your health is only worth whatever figure some government bean counter assigns to it.
Desperate to prevent medical costs from engulfing the federal budget, the program’s central planners decided last week to deny payment for a new version of one of life’s most unpleasant routine procedures, the colonoscopy. This is a preview of how health care will be rationed when Democrats get their way.
At issue are “virtual colonoscopies,” or CT scans of the abdomen. Colon cancer is the second leading cause of U.S. cancer death but one of the most preventable. Found early, the cure rate is 93%, but only 8% at later stages. Virtual colonoscopies are likely to boost screenings because they are quicker, more comfortable and significantly cheaper than the standard “optical” procedure, which involves anesthesia and threading an endoscope through the lower intestine.
Virtual colonoscopies are endorsed by the American Cancer Society and covered by a growing number of private insurers including Cigna and UnitedHealthcare. The problem for Medicare is that if cancerous lesions are found using a scan, then patients must follow up with a traditional colonoscopy anyway. Costs would be lower if everyone simply took the invasive route, where doctors can remove polyps on the spot. As Medicare noted in its ruling, “If there is a relatively high referral rate [for traditional colonoscopy], the utility of an intermediate test such as CT colonography is limited.” In other words, duplication would be too pricey.
“Too pricey.” That despite the fact that virtual colonoscopies could catch cancer earlier and save people’s lives.
Those are the sorts of decisions we invite government to make for us when we invite them to provide us with health care. A system of health care where you can only get the health care you can afford to pay for is far from optimal, but it’s better than allowing some bureaucrat to make arbitrary decisions about the care you receive based on their bottom line and not your health.
And make no doubt about it. These same rationing decisions can, and would, happen if America gets stuck with a nationalized health care system.
