Patient Power

Rationing vs. choosing how to spend your own money

Ronald Bailey makes the distinction at Reason:

…”rationing” depends on who is allocating the scarce resources. It’s not rationing if an individual decides to spend his money on a 16-ounce steak—but it is rationing if he can only purchase a USDA prime rib eye when he has a coupon issued from a government agency. In other words, true rationing occurs when individuals are forbidden from spending their money on products or services they want to buy.

Imperfect as private health insurance markets are, if a customer doesn’t like the decisions made by Blue Cross Blue Shield, Kaiser Permanente, or Golden Rule insurance bureaucrats, he can look elsewhere for his health insurance coverage.^* But if the government health care scheme becomes a monopoly, when the bureaucrats at the new Health Benefits Advisory Committee decide that a treatment should be withheld, that treatment will be withheld. That’s rationing.

“Americans should get the first chance to limit their own health spending,” Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) observed recently. “Once they learn the true cost of what they are buying, share a larger portion of the cost, and can judge the benefits—if any—of treatment options, then they will choose more wisely than the government.” He’s right. Congress should think about “rationing” health insurance and health care the old-fashioned way—through the market.

^* We’d have more freedom to choose our insurance company if politicians did not enforce a tax code that sticks us with our employer’s choice of plans. - BTS

Read the whole article:  Is it “rationing” when consumers decide how to spend their own money?

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• Distorted priorities of Oregon Health Plan (Medicaid)
• ObamaCare is all about rationing
• Medicare’s “global budget” & bureaucratic medical decisions
• Health rationing and you