Of Course We Need to Ration Health Care. But the Question Is WHEN?

Read how a woman remains in severe pain because health care is being rationed THE WRONG TIME.

I encourage you to read a very informative article here. It reports the following, in detail:

A woman is in severe back pain. She needs a surgery that can end the pain. The insurance company refuses to pay for the surgery. Her doctor appeals and the insurance company calls in an “independent” consulting firm to decide. The “independent” firm also denies the claim. It just so happens that the “independent” firm’s medical director’s “license was suspended by the state of New Jersey for three years starting in 2014 because he “engaged in, or condoned his agent to engage in on his behalf, a pattern of misrepresentation in order to optimize a revenue source from a succession of... health care service entities in which he or his then-wife owned significant beneficial interest.”  This “independent” firm also “had an employment relationship with Spyros Panos, who lost his license to practice medicine, was convicted twice of health care fraud and was sentenced to 54 months in prison.”

This is not an exceptional fluke. “A 2022 report from the consultancy group Crowe LLP found that the dollar value of denials had increased to 2.5% of hospitals’ gross revenue in August 2022 from 1.5% in January 2021 — a huge 66% jump in less than two years. The growth in prior authorization denials likely helped drive a sixfold increase in hospital bankruptcies in 2023 from the prior year.”

My egalitarian take

The lords of the realm tell us that we live in a world of finite resources: finite raw materials and finite amounts of human labor. They tell us that there is therefore only so much that we can do with the resources we have. This means, they say, that we cannot have infinite health care. We must limit the amount of health care we provide so that we can produce other things we need, from housing to education, entertainment, defense, infrastructure maintenance, and on and on. Therefore, we cannot just approve any and all requests for expensive medical care. We must ration medical care, hard as this may be for some people to accept.

Guess what? I agree with this, with one tiny proviso about timing.

When is the right time to ratio health care?

The right TIME to ration health care is not before, but

• after we no longer divert our finite resources to provide things like this to some people:

  

• and after we stop devoting more than a TRILLION dollars of resources for so-called “defense” spending that is actually keep-the-rich-in-power-and-make-them-richer spending:

  

• and after nobody is being paid many millions of dollars a year to boss low-paid people doing the real work:

and after…well you get the idea, right?

Only THEN is it the right TIME to ration health care and perhaps tell somebody in pain “We can’t afford to provide you the surgery that would give you relief because we need to ration our finite resources and make sure we also have enough housing and education and entertainment and defense and infrastructure maintenance, and so on.”

Right?

Read here how YOU can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement to make our society one in which it would be proper to ration the uses to which we put our finite resources.

Until we make this revolution we’ll have our finite resources used to make a few rich at the expense of everybody else, like this: