"Common Sense" Health Care Reform Principles

Uwe Reinhardt Economix Blog

The All-American Wish List for Health Reform

1. Only patients and their own doctors should decide what clinical response is appropriate for a given medical condition, even if that response involves
   unproven clinical procedures or technology.
2. Neither government bureaucrats nor private insurance bureaucrats should ever refuse to pay for whatever patients and their doctors have decided to do in response to a given medical condition. An insurer’s refusal to pay for a medical procedure is tantamount to rationing health care.
3. Rationing health care is un-American.
4. Cost-effectiveness analysis should never be the basis of any coverage decision by public or private third-party payers in health care, for to do so would put a price on human life — which, in America, unlike everywhere else, is priceless.
5. Government should not require individuals to purchase health insurance. Such a mandate would violate the constitutional rights of freedom-loving Americans.
6. Americans have a moral right to life-saving and potentially highly expensive medical care, should they fall critically ill, even if they are uninsured and could not possibly pay for that care with their own financial resources. (Why else would God have created hospitals and their emergency rooms?)
7. Government should stay out of health care. Specifically, government should not control health care prices, nor should it increase its spending on health care, which is out of control.
8. Even small reductions to the future growth of Medicare spending — called “cuts” in Washington parlance — unfairly burden the elderly, along with the
   doctors and hospitals that serve them and the manufacturers of health products, lest the pace of technical innovation be impaired.
   

And so on, and so forth. Any health policy analyst over the age of 40 could easily double the list. It might make for a good parlor game at a bar.

Readers may believe I am jesting. But follow the editorial pages or punditry, especially of the conservative news media, over some time.

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