The Oregonian has an editorial up highlighting the fact that the state-run Oregon Health Plan won’t cover a terminal patient’s chemotherapy but will pay for them to die.

Opponents of physician-assisted suicide are fired up this summer, and rightfully so, over an ethically questionable provision of the Oregon Health Plan.

The conflict came to light in a recent report in The Register-Guard of Eugene. The newspaper described the sad plight of Barbara Wagner, a 64-year-old Springfield woman with lung cancer.

After her oncologist prescribed a cancer drug that would cost $4,000 a month, the newspaper reported, “Wagner was notified that the Oregon Health Plan wouldn’t cover the treatment, but that it would cover palliative, or comfort, care, including, if she chose, doctor-assisted suicide.”

That presents an unacceptable conflict. The state health program should not be in the position of denying chemotherapy to terminally ill patients while offering to pay the cost of helping them die.

The piece goes on to address this as an end-of-life issue, but I think the larger point here is just how awful government-run health care is.

Think about it this way: When other people are paying for your health care, whether it be your employer or the government, you aren’t the customer any more.  And thus you lose control over the level and quality of care you receive.  By abdicating your responsibility when it comes to paying the bill for your health care you also lose a good deal of your control over that care.

Which is how this poor woman in Eugene found herself unable to choose to fight her disease but able to choose to succumb to it.

The idea of government-run health care, with everyone paying for everyone else’s health care, sounds nice on paper.  But in practice it’s the government, and not really the taxpayers, that start calling the shots on health care in such a system.  And when you’re stuck in the system and find yourself unhappy with the care you’re receiving you won’t have any alternatives.

You can try to fight the government and get things changed, but that’s not likely to be a practical choice for someone who is already sick and may not have the resources to take up such a struggle.

Better, I think, to face the limitations of paying for our own health care where at least we have some modicum of control over the sort of care we receive than to be in the thrall of a massive government health care where we get the sort of care government bureaucrats decide we deserve.