I do not post often enough, so I am grateful that Bird Dog keeps me on the Soros-sponsored payroll.
Our worthy and self-sacrificing editor emailed this piece to me from Stumbling and Mumbling, a pleasantly cantankerous economics-oriented Brit blog. Apparently the Brit NHS has a euphemistically-named "National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence," (does that sound like something out of Brave New World?)whose job is to decide what treatments the government will pay for with your tax dollars. They try to apply cost-benefit analysis to your problem.
Of course, such a process necessarily politicizes medical treatment by making every treatment, and every disease, a political football, with the loudest voices and the squeakiest wheels and the most pathetic stories winning out. And also turns every person into an expense item on a spread sheet, thus making it cost effective for everyone to die promptly without burdening their neighbors, at the precise moment when they cease to generate tax revenue. Citizens become, in essence, farm animals on a government plantation.
The potentially-fatal flaw in democracy is that people can vote themselves "free" stuff, because there is no end to that childish wish. But with each "freebie," there is a loss of autonomy, of self-reliance, of adulthood, and of freedom.
American patients are accustomed to have their problems insulated from government cost-benefit committees. They are accustomed to freedom, which can cost a bit more. And if they require low-cost or free care, they can go to any clinic they want, almost everywhere in the US. I work in one, for nothing, in Providence, one day a week, and have done so for 20 years - but you have to prove that you are poor. You may not take advantage of our good intentions. And if you sue us, you can, should, and will, go to hell.
Well, that was a digression from the point at Stumbling that I wished to highlight. He noted that no other government "programs" are subjected to cost-benefit analysis, except for medical treatments.
Now, you just have to wonder, why might that be?
I have faith that, in general, Americans will never sell their freedoms for a bowl of lentils.
