Government Health Care Means The Government Putting A Price Tag On What Your Life Is Worth
Don’t believe it? They’re already doing it in Great Britain, where they use metric called QALY (quality-adjusted life year) to determine whether or not a particular treatment is used to extend a patient’s life. Meaning that in Britain’s health care system, the government is literally involved with calculating how much your life is worth.
The Brits have had to constantly grapple with this distaste. On several occasions, the institute has had to reverse, modify or reconsider rejections under political or professional pressure. Last year it convened a citizens’ council to ponder rules for relaxing its 30,000-pound standard — with a majority of the council favoring loosening the rules when the treatment is “lifesaving,” the patients are children, the illness is severe or rare, or no alternative therapies exist.
Another issue is the lack of any empirical basis for the 30,000-pound standard. No one seems to know how it was determined. That’s important, because U.S. health economists tend to use a similar $50,000 cut-off for cost-effectiveness.
Why $50,000? Scott Grosse, a health economist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speculated in a 2008 study that it might be based on the “convenience of a round number” rather than on “theoretical or empirical justification,” which he says doesn’t exist.
I’ll grant that America’s way of doing health care – which allows you to get all the treatment you can afford to pay for – isn’t perfect. But at least its better than the determination for how much health care you’re worth being taken completely out of your hands and instead decided by government bureaucrats who, frankly, probably have more incentive to meet their bottom line than to keep you alive.
Tags: Asshats, Domestic Issues, Politics
