Current costs, with or without national health care, are unsustainable. An internist advocates "lifestyle rationing." If you smoke, don't exercise, over-eat and refuse to diet, your care should cost more, he says. If you want top-of-the-line care, using all of the most high-tech machinery, your care should cost more, he says.
It makes little sense, given all our health care deficiencies and priorities, to spend huge amounts of money going to extraordinary measures to save extremely premature infants or senior citizens who are quite naturally at the end of life.
Looks like we've got some painful choices ahead.
A reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog counters that "Americans already tolerate rationing - health care in the USA is stringently rationed by price and employment status." A free market in health care is nonsensical, the reader contends. Another reader offers this: "If the free market is better than government, let the government offer a public option and see how the private companies compete. I think you will find their rates dropping almost magically."
Related: Why Health Care Costs So Much
and a doctor complains about Americans' sense of entitlement when it comes to health care.
