Health Care, in Today's News 08.19.09

Health Care. Mark Steyn has an excellent commentary on 'death panels' and 'panels' in general. If his themes were to be picked up in the health care debate, it would clarify the issues.

Today's Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece, "Obama Care Is All About Rationing," by Martin Feldstein, a member of the WSJ's board of contributors. The first half or so of the article is very good, but then he drops into how to reduce health spending.

From the good part: "The President has emphasized the importance of limiting services to 'health care that works'...That [approach] could morph over time into a cost-control mechanism of the sort proposed by Sen. Tom Daschle, Mr. Obama's original choice for White House health czar. Comparative effectiveness could become the vehicle for deciding whether each method of treatment provides enough of an improvement in health care to justify its cost."

He hits on the key aim of the cryptocracy, which is to somehow take away health decisions from each individual. The goal is to subordinate all health decisions to some sort of cost-cutting criterion. The article describes how England does it.

This goal is the sine qua non for the cryptocracy. They must have cost-cutting as the basis of medical treatment to ensure that their profits are not eaten away by rising health costs.

The cryptocracy will do almost anything to achieve this goal. There will be lots of maneuvering and compromises and demagogy in the next period of time over what the health legislation should look like. But the cryptocracy must somehow get its foot in the door on cost-cutting, and their employees in the national legislature will be doing their best to meet that need.

By the way, the cryptocracy cannot be too pleased with Obama right now. Instituting cost-cutting in health care was one of his principle assignments. He was selected by them to be the candidate in part because they thought he could pull it off. And now he has bungled it, perhaps irretrievably.

Also, it is interesting that the Democrats are leading the charge on cost-cutting, which is usually the Republicans' schtick. Of course, the Republicans could never have gotten this far with similar legislation. So, the cynical cryptocracy simply has the party with the most credibility currently carry out its dirty work.