A Gross misunderstanding

The blog post upon which I comment is two weeks old, but it's simply too awful to be ignored. New York Times blogger Jane Gross attacks critics of ObamaCare, saying that we need government intervention to get rid of healthcare waste. The examples she gives are mammograms for patients in nursing homes (who might not even seek treatment for breast cancer should it be discovered); CPR on the very elderly; expensive pharmaceuticals for patients with Alzheimer's who derive little benefit from the drugs. Obama's proposal of spending stimulus-package money on analyzing healthcare to ferret out inefficiencies, she strongly implies, is just what we need.

There's an extraordinary amount of evasion going on here -- because Ms. Gross is ignoring the fact that government intervention is exactly what got us to such a scale of wastefulness in the first place.

Why would a patient in a nursing home, too demented to recognize her own family, much less consent to treatment for breast cancer, be given regular mammograms? A) Because she's on Medicare, and when the government is paying, her children are probably only too happy to say "Do everything you can for my mother!" knowing that they won't foot the bill. B) Because malpractice law is so non-objective that hospitals would far rather spend taxpayer dollars ordering unnecessary tests than fork over their own money in a lawsuit later.

The problem (well, one of them) with government-funded healthcare is that medical decisions are put into the hands of politicians -- and that means that decisions are made based on which group has the most pull, not mutual trade to mutual benefit. Probably a patient advocacy group made up of people who'd lost their mothers or sisters to breast cancer were upset that missed mammograms had cost their loved ones their lives. So they decided that every woman deserves a mammogram, and lobbied Congress until mammograms became a Medicare entitlement. And now, women get mammograms regardless of whether it makes medical sense, and sometimes regardless of whether the patient actually wants one. Voila! Wasteful medicine, courtesy of the government.

If the government were to get out of healthcare -- paying for it AND regulating it -- then every individual could decide for himself what level of healthcare he wants and can afford. The elderly man who has lived a long and happy life and does not want to spend his declining years pumped full of pharmaceuticals could just tell his doctor, "No, I'd rather not have that." His counterpart who wants to extend his life as long as possible, regardless of how healthy his last years are, would be free to spend his own money making that choice. Every individual would be able to exercise his right to trade to mutual benefit in the realm of healthcare -- and there would be no such thing as "wasteful" spending, because each individual would purchase only what he wanted and could afford.

Don't make the Gross evasion of thinking that government intervention can solve America's healthcare problems. What we need to do is remove the government interventions that caused those problems in the first place.