Say Anything Blog

Peter Singer has an interesting column in the New York Times in which he attempts to make a case for government rationing of health care.  To make his point, he poses the following scenario:

You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much?

If you can afford it, you probably would pay that much, or more, to live longer, even if your quality of life wasn’t going to be good. But suppose it’s not you with the cancer but a stranger covered by your health-insurance fund. If the insurer provides this man — and everyone else like him — with Sutent, your premiums will increase. Do you still think the drug is a good value? Suppose the treatment cost a million dollars. Would it be worth it then? Ten million? Is there any limit to how much you would want your insurer to pay for a drug that adds six months to someone’s life? If there is any point at which you say, “No, an extra six months isn’t worth that much,” then you think that health care should be rationed.

His point is that you cannot provide an unlimited supply of medical care.  It’s impossible.  Nobody can do it.  Not the government.  Not the private health insurance industry.  Even the wealthiest citizens of earth only a finite amount of resources they can spend on their own health care or the health care of their loved ones.

And, in that narrow sense, I agree with Mr. Singer.  Health care has to be rationed.  The question is how should it be rationed.  Singer, like other proponents of government health care, thinks that such rationing should be the function of government.  We should have bureaucrats telling us when, where and how much medical care we can receive.

Personally, I’d rather have the market do such rationing.  Because while market rationing still isn’t perfect - there are always going to be people who don’t have enough money to get the health care they need - I’d rather know that I can always buy as much health care as I want even if I sometimes can’t afford all I need than be locked into a system where someone who doesn’t even know me and may have other interests than my health in mind making decisions about my care.

The idea we need to bury is this utopian dream of everyone being able to waltz into a hospital and get all the health care they could possibly want.  Because that’s never going to happen.

What we should seek is the empowerment of individuals to pay for their own health care.  Not more third-party health care nonsense that only results in our health care being rationed by someone else.