The Post helped to promote completely baseless fears about health care rationing today, at one point telling readers the views of "medical professionals" that: "the question, they say, is not whether there will be rationing, but rather what will be rationed, and when and how." This is of course not true. No one is currently proposing that the government prohibit people from purchasing whatever health care services they want to pay for. This is what rationing means. There certainly are, and will continue to be, limits on what insurance, either public or private, will pay for. However, this has nothing to do with rationing and the Post badly misleads its reader in implying that these limits are rationing. It also would have been worth noting in an article like this that many of expensive drugs and procedures are not inherently expensive, but are only costly because of patent protection. The Post refuses to ever discuss more efficient mechanisms for financing medical research, such as the prize system promoted by Nobel prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz.
--Dean Baker
