In my post about Opiate of the People, Cl asked for more details about the adverse effects of socialized medicine. Well, here’s one.
The latest issue of The Weekly Standard has an ad from www.rehabcare.com with a photo of a nice old gentleman with a walker accompanied by a caring young female therapist. It reads:
Tell Congress to pass a sensible Medicare bill now.
On July 1, bureaucratic limits will go into effect that restrict access to necessary physical rehabilitation for millions of Americans. Unless Congress acts soon, arbitrary caps will be placed on the services that all therapists can provide their Medicare patients.
Stop senseless bureaucracy for Medicare beneficiaries and preserve patient access to the therapy they need.
There’s an interesting gimmick here. How do you appeal to the conservative readership of TWS to get them to lobby for more government spending on themselves? By pretending it’s not an issue of money but one of evil bureaucracy.
And usually the nationalized health care advocates blame those nasty insurance companies for not paying. Turn it all over to a governmental insurance system, and somehow we will no longer have those greedy capitalists holding back money for treatment, they imply. Except in this case, it’s the government that’s holding back money. How about that! And they want to turn all of health care over to that kind of provider.
It’s a foretaste of what will happen when health care is completely nationalized. Health care decisions will be based not on merit but according to whichever interest groups have the political clout to get money for their favorite disease or malady. And that means we’ll all have to corrupt ourselves to make the kinds of compromises and bargains necessary to get funding for what ails us.
And that sort of corruption has a multiplier effect.