Lets get the facts straight about “rationing” healthcare

I am constantly amazed that people will argue against healthcare reform in the United States on the basis that it will lead to rationing. Is it not clear that we are already rationing healthcare based on arcane, arbitrary, and morally irrelevant rules such as pre-existing conditions and the size of a person’s bank account?

This article explains the obvious absurdity of the current rationing system:

A report issued by the Department of Health and Human Services indicates the current health insurance system “leaves millions behind” due to coverage denial practices.

The report, issued Tuesday, cites a recent national survey showing 12.6 million non-elderly adults – 36 percent of those who tried to buy insurance on the private market – were deemed ineligible for coverage by insurance agencies. Many of the denied patients had cancer. According to the survey, insurance companies either charged a higher premium or refused to cover the condition.

Another survey cited in the report found one in 10 people with cancer said they could not get health coverage, and 6 percent said they lost their coverage because of their diagnosis.

“The insurance company practice of denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions is not confined to serious diseases,” HHS officials said. “Even minor problems such as hay fever could trigger prohibitive responses.”

An insurer could charge high premiums, deny coverage or set a restriction such as denying any respiratory disease coverage to a person with hay fever, according to the report.

The study also found that some insurance companies respond to an expensive condition such as cancer by initiating a thorough review of the patient’s health insurance application. If the insurer discovers that any medical condition, regardless of how minor, was not reported on the application, it could revoke coverage retroactively for the patient and possibly all members of the patient’s family, the report said. That practice is known as rescission.

Companies can do this even if the condition found is not related to the expensive condition or if the person wasn’t aware of the condition at the time. At least one company encouraged employees to revoke sick people’s health coverage through rescissions, the report said.

It is vapid and unproductive for critics to claim that healthcare reform will lead to rationing because any limited resource is going to have to be rationed somehow. In fact, introductory economics classes typically begin with a discussion about how resource allocation is necessary in a world of inherently scarce resources. This need to allocate resources is used to introduce the concept of the free market (ie. lets allocate based solely on supply and demand). It is ironic then that the conservatives are arguing that healthcare is going to be rationed under reform proposals when conservative economic theory is rooted in this idea that everything must be rationed.

There’s also the fact that the current healthcare bills don’t have a public option, an opt-in to medicare for older people, or most of the other hallmarks of progressive healthcare reform. Since the current bill seeks to expand health insurance coverage by mandating insurance and providing subsidies to the private insurance companies instead, where do these conservatives think this (supposedly new) rationing will come from? Won’t care be rationed almost as it is now except that insurance companies will be less able to deny coverage based on health, family history, and wealth? It sure sounds like more equal rationing to me, although we should really get the profit-driven insurance companies out of our healthcare completely.