What happens when the government foots most of the bill for medical care? For one thing, government gets to decide which medical procedures it will cover, and which will be labeled ?unnecessary.?
You don?t have to fear death panels to see where that path leads. Read Sharon Begley?s latest Newsweek article for an example of the type of cost-cutting maneuvers that are bound to follow a move toward a larger government role in health care:
[Texas family physician Howard] Brody recently proposed, in The New England Journal of Medicine, that every medical specialty identify five procedures?diagnostic or therapeutic?that are done a lot and cost a lot but provide no benefits to some or all of the patients who receive them. Five is just a suggestion, high enough to be meaningful but low enough to exclude procedures in which the science is still open to debate.
Substitute a government bureaucrat with power over the health-care sector for Dr. Brody. Think this process would have real implications for people? What about the patients who would benefit from the procedures deemed unbeneficial? Think those patients are likely to get coverage for those treatments in a system that will be struggling to find savings?
There is a better way to cut costs: allow consumer-driven health care of the type Regina Herzlinger describes below.
