National

Health care rationing that is.

David Leonhardt at the NYT has another Must Read article detailing all of the ways that health care is rationed in the US.

Today, I want to try to explain why the case against rationing isn’t really a substantive argument. It’s a clever set of buzzwords that tries to hide the fact that societies must make choices.

He spends his article taking a look at how rationing is something of an economic fact of life (there aren’t many of us driving one of these) — the allocation of scare resources requires active management, actually making decisions about how those recourses are allocated. Except as far as our medical care is concerned, we don’t actively think about allocating medical resources. So there is a built in passivity (or avoidance behavior of the decisions) that is ratcheting up the cost of our care and ensuring that our outcomes are collectively in the middle of the pack. To that end, they’ve included a very cool graphic: