(Blog Post) There's one piece of persistent dishonesty in the debate over health care that I would like to see vanish once and for all. It concerns the word 'rationing'. You can use it in several ways. Full Story »
Posted by Kaizar Campwala
Blows a hole in the talk of "rationing" that opponents of public health insurance so frequently fall back on. This is level-headed and intellectual, and while it is warm to Obama's plan, its real aim is to convince us to see beyond the spin in the health care debate.
When some people talk about rationing, they mean something scarier: the idea that someone, possibly the government, allocates quantities of something, and forbids anyone to obtain more of it. Thus, if the government rations gasoline in wartime, you get your gas coupons, and you are not allowed to buy any more gasoline, period. (That’s why black markets are illegal.) Likewise, when reselling tickets is illegal, ticket vendors are, in this sense, rationing tickets. No one — no one — is proposing to ration health care in this way. Not Barack Obama, not Bernie Sanders, no one. Every serious proposal I’m aware of would allow people to purchase whatever health care they want, so long as a doctor is willing to prescribe it. And not only that, they can purchase supplemental insurance, like those add-on plans for Medicare.
