Medicare, no matter how it came into being, is now operating as an independent cause of social change. It is now fueling the trolley’s movement. Because Medicare pools health care money, it creates a problem for government bureaucrats of deciding who will get that money. They then invoke arbitrary criteria. For example, seeing that elder care costs more money per person than middle-age care, they decide to allocate less to the elderly and more to the middle-aged. They then argue that this is fair and just. Seeing that procedure A is more expensive than procedure B, they control (lower) the price of procedure A, and this creates excess demand for procedure A. The number of rules, restrictions, and controls is endless. Medicine becomes a branch of politics.
The politics of Medicare is explained.
No comments:
Post a Comment