Socialized Health-Care Will Lead to Rationing Treatment and Euthanasia

President Obama said that his health-care plan will reduce the overall cost of medical treatment. What he didn't tell you was how that goal will be attained. Obama said that the government will cut inefficiencies and focus on prevention in order to cut costs. While prevention does save some money, it is a small fraction of the savings that death will bring. Denying certain costly procedures to those deemed by bureaucrats as "unlikely to benefit from them", will bring about the lions share of savings in a government run health-care program.

Most people spend most of their health-care dollars in the final years of their life. Imagine how much savings could be achieved if we simply did not treat people who are deemed to be "unlikely to benefit from treatment" because they are elderly. Cost savings could also be achieved by limiting care to those who contributed to their own maladies with unhealthy behavior such as excessive drinking, narcotics abuse, smoking, poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle. Bureaucrats, not families, doctors or patients, will make these tough decisions if the government takes over our nations health-care system.

This approach will be totally justifiable when tough choices must be made by government bureaucrats, not individuals, about how to spend our limited health-care dollars. Procedures and surgeries for younger patients, with many more years of life expectancy potential, will obviously be a better investment than for treatment 80 year old infirm patients or chronic alcoholics.

Desperate times will call for desperate measures. Already our medicare and social-security systems are headed for bankruptcy. The best way to relieve this strain on an overburdened system is to ration care to the elderly and those who require a disproportionate share of medical care do to their lifestyle choices and unhealthy behavior.

Under Obama's proposals, euthanasia will eventually become an option. The government will run PSAs advising people that euthanasia is the patriotic thing to do for those who have no longer have the wherewithal to "give back" to their country in other ways.

There is no doubt that the cheapest form of health care is allowing patients to die. This has become part of health-care system in other countries with socialized medicine. Allowing patients to die will undoubtedly become part of an American socialized health-care system.

I have never seen a well intentioned liberal program that did not have "negative unintended consequences" that hurt the very same people that they were trying to help. In this case, nationalized health-care will limit expensive treatments to the elderly and to the poor the most.