Our Health Care System: Inefficiency, is that a problem?

The Washington Times presents a tortured argument against promoting more efficient care in the most expensive health care non-system in the world.

Think of it, a centralized, federal database tracking your every visit to a health care provider – where you went, who you saw, what was diagnosed and what care was provided. Chilling.  Medicynical note: as if private insurers oversight that  controls and limits treatment given is less intrusive, or as if the data will have patient identifiers.

The Times takes issue with the notion of efficiency in health care.  To them, apparently,   spending 50% more per capita on health care than any other nation in the world and 17% of GDP, and increasing yearly, is acceptable:

There is no telling what metrics will be used to define the efficiencies, but it is clear who will bear the brunt of these decisions. Those suffering the infirmities of age, surely, and also the physically and mentally disabled, whose health costs are great and whose ability to work productively in the future are low. And how will premature babies fare under the utilitarian gaze of Washington’s health efficiency experts? Will our severely wounded warriors be forced to forgo treatments and therapies based on their inability to be as productive as they once might have been? And will the love between a parent and child have a column on the health bureaucrats’ spreadsheets?

The Times then goes on to compare cost efficacy measures with the nazis.

Medicynical note: Nothing surprising here. Until we show some will to control  costs our non-system caring for an aging increasingly health care needy population will continue to spend our nation’s wealth.

Our republican friends have been amazingly quiet about their solutions. Their “free market” rhetoric leads one to assume they would put an increasingly large burden of expense on individuals–their form of individual mandate. They would then let the costs of health care assure economic rationing. For those who can’t afford care, I suppose their solution for patients is that of 18th century France and will let them eat cake.