Health Care Reform, Ms. Palin Weighs In

Finally, after all this time mucking around with boring and complex health care experts, a voice from the wilderness has weighed in in terms we can all understand. “Evil.” Ms. Palin actually used the word evil to describe the Health Care system she has fabricated to be the Obama Plan.

Conjuring up pictures of a thumbs-down bloodstained and leering (but decidedly Wonkish) Obama/Caligula “death panel,” Ms. Palin recently informed her Facebook followers with this “Statement on the Current Health Care Debate,”

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course.The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

This woman was slated to be a heartbeat from the presidency; she looks to get closer. She has over 700,000 “supporters” on her Facebook page.

The statement starts thus:

As more Americans delve into the disturbing details of the nationalized health care plan that the current administration is rushing through Congress, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no!

Without delving deeply into the merits of the argument (others have done so ably–there are none, this is make-believe coupled with demagoguery of the worst sort which also pretends that Private Insurers offer unlimited care at present– but for a very good point by point refutation you can look at any of these compiled over at Kaiser, or this fact-checker from ABC’s Senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper), might I suggest a certain logical inconsistency even within the make-believe of Ms. Palin’s view? In her opposition to a Government or Public Option, she seems left with an option in which a Private Insurance Executive, concerned as he must be with Corporate Profits, would be more likely to extend payment for massive health care expenses to Grandma and Baby Trig than the spendthrift “tax and spend” Democrats she consistently describes as “fiscally irresponsible.” One might imagine a slightly better chance with Howard Dean or Ted Kennedy than with a Health Insurance CEO that made $467,000 PER WEEK last year –and wanted to do so again this year. No?

Martyrdom of Ten Thousand Christians, Albrecht Durer (1508)

If you read her post carefully ( I know, but perhaps you could humor me for a moment) what she seems to be saying is that in effect, the fiscal irresponsibility of the spendthrift Democrats in offering health insurance to all will itself lead to, and force, rationing. But the question then, of course, is this: rationing to whom and on what scale? Her premise it seems is necessarily that the absence of health care for some, at present, makes it possible for the unlimited healthcare of  many (i.e., in Ms. Palin’s make believe world, Private Insurers at present offer unlimited non-rationed Health Benefits to those who, at present,  have health insurance, but if the poor and uninsured are given access to healthcare, that will bankrupt the system and require limitations upon those who had formerly held unlimited access to care– or, in short, if the poor and uninsured get some, the presently covered will get less). How is that not rationing?

If rationing is the selective distribution of scarce resources via certain criteria–some form of merit or lack thereof–then rationing is exactly what happens under Ms. Palin’s make-believe model at present: the utilitarian calculus en masse. The distribution criteria, however, in Ms. Palin’s model, is money–which becomes a “death panel” in and of itself. A “communal standard” based on wealth. Simply put, in Ms. Palin’s world, she necessarily allows for that most efficient of instruments, the market, to decide who lives or dies.

Strangely enough, Ms. Palin’s world begins to look a lot like ours.