Sam Hieb also pointed to this story as a foretaste of socialized medicine.
In case you doubt it, check what one blogger from Nebraska (which ranked high when I Googled Randy Stroup) had to say:
Yes, it would be so much worse if health care decisions where made by government bureaucrats instead of insurance bureaucrats because insurance represents a free-market decision that the man is too poor to live and the Free Market is never wrong. So government shouldn?t run health care because a few people will be deprived very expensive treatments? So it?s much better now that many poor people are deprived of moderately expensive treatments?
…
It might seem callous to put a dollar value on life, but we have to live in the real world and decide where to spend limited government funds.
But the only reason “we have to … decide where to spend limited government funds” is because “we” have destroyed the market and substituted government for individuals.
Consumer-driven health care puts the dollars back in the patient/consumer’s hands allowing him to make decisions for himself instead of having to hope that insurance or government bureaucrats will understand his preferences.
As Thomas Sowell put it in Knowledge and Decisions:
The question is not what to decide, as to whether specific retrospective data are justified, but rather who shall decide which prospective transactions are justified on what terms in an on-going process. More to the point, shall observers who experience neither the benefits nor the cost use force (the government) to supersede the judgments of those who do? The issue is not between one particular set of statistical results and another. The issue is between one kind of social process and another, and between one set of decision-makers and another
