Kip Sullivan responds to the following quote of Humphrey Taylor of Harris Interactive from “The Health Care Debate We Are Not Having”:
Humphrey Taylor:
“Increasing productivity, reducing errors, lowering costs, improving lifestyles and prevention, and cutting waste, fraud and abuse are all admirable goals which would make the money go further – but never far enough to avoid the need to ration care.”
Kip Sullivan:
I’m amazed at how often health care experts and insurance industry officials make statements like this with utter confidence. The claim that rationing is inevitable is pure ideology.
Part of the problem is the failure of those who use the term “rationing” in a health policy context to define it, which in turn permits loose usage. “Rationing” in the health policy context, as opposed to most other contexts, currently has two meanings. In the hands of right-wing critics of the health systems of other countries, “rationing” always means denial of NECESSARY medical services. (It’s no fun accusing Canada of denying UNnecessary services to its citizens.) But in the hands of people like Taylor criticizing opinion makers in this county, “rationing” means ANY denial of medical care, necessary or unnecessary.
In every other context that I can think of offhand, one needn’t define “rationing.” That’s because in other contexts we assume that — or at minimum we do not debate the proposition that — if people want the item in question their wants should be respected. Thus, if a history book says sugar was rationed in World War II, or if a newspaper says Cuba is rationing electricity on hot days, we assume that all of the sugar and electricity demanded was needed, or, at minimum, it doesn’t occur to us to question whether all those slobs on the home front really needed all that sugar, or whether the demand for electricity in Cuba was 80 percent legitimate and 20 percent frivolous. Because rationing means in most other contexts denial of necessary or, at minimum, legitimately demanded goods or services, we ought to insist that it be used that way in the health policy context.
Ergo, we should conduct guerilla warfare against “rationing” when it is used to refer to ANY denial of medical services, needed or not needed. It is utterly unenlightening to say that I have been “rationed” if I asked my doctor for a medical service I didn’t need and my doctor refused to order it. We have perfectly good words to describe what has been done to me that don’t imply that I was denied medicine I needed.
Similarly, it is of no interest to me to learn from Taylor that “rationing” occurs all over the industrialized world. Unless speakers like Taylor present some evidence that the health systems of the French, the Canadians, etc. are routinely denying NECESSARY medical services, I consider it meaningless to say that “rationing” is universal.
Kip