Biden: Women Should Be “Entitled To Every Single, Solitary Operation”

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Written By:
Rob Port

Oct 18, 2012
12:02pm

“I got a daughter, lost a daughter, got four granddaughters, and Barack has two daughters,” said Vice President Joe Biden recently on the campaign stump. “We are absolutely — this is to our core — my daughter, and my granddaughters and Barack’s daughters are entitled to every single solitary operation!”

Here’s the video:

I’m not sure why Biden is campaigning against the straw man idea that Republicans want to deny women operations. Especially when the biggest threat to health care access in America is coming out of the Obama administration.

The Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) is a commission of bureaucrats tasked with reducing the government’s health care costs by making decisions about which health care treatments – up to and including operations for women – might be too costly or unnecessary. The IPAB is not at all unlike the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (except that the IPAB has more authority to make us obey its decrees) which caused an uproar after they decreed that mammograms for women under 50 were unnecessary.

Is that what we want? Government panels telling us what health care we can and cannot access? We shouldn’t want that, yet that sort of rationing goes hand-in-hand with government health care. If you’re going to ask the government to provide health care, or even just control health care costs, then you’re inviting the government in to make health care decisions for you.

That’s exactly the sort of health care policy the Obama administration has been pushing since day one.

And not only is it bad policy, but this very idea that anyone is entitled to services provided by someone else – whether it be a scoop of ice cream or an operation – is anathema to the concept of freedom. If you’re entitled to a service provided by someone else, then you’re turning that someone else into a slave forced to give you something whether they want to or not.

What Americans are entitled to is the opportunity to purchase services from other people at a mutually agreed upon price. To the extent that government should be involved, it should be in creating more of that opportunity and enforcing laws against fraudulent transactions. That’s it. The solution to health care isn’t creating entitlements. The solution to health care is more freedom.