Thursday, April 23, 2009

Who Should Control Your Health Care?

In his April 20, 2009 essay at, Jeff Emanuel warns about the latest move by the government to wrest control of medical decision making from doctors and patients. Here's an excerpt from his article:
Who Should Control Your Health Care?

Who should have control over your medical care: your family doctor or a bureaucrat you've never met whose sole job is to look out for the government's financial bottom line?

That question is being debated in court right now, as three states are currently seeking a ruling from a federal judge that the final say in an individual's medical treatment lies with the government and not with that patient's doctor...
Read the whole thing.

The state claims that because it is paying for the care, it should have some say in how that money is spent.

If the US proceeds to adopt any sort of government-run universal health care, then this argument will become the norm -- as it already is in Great Britain and Canada.

The inevitable end result will be rationing.

This is just the latest of the many warning signs that Americans have heard about government-run health care. The critical question is whether we'll heed them before it's too late.