In the American debate over whether to adopt state-run health care (or "ObamaCare"), one continual concern is whether the adoption of so-called universal health care would lead to "rationing." For instance, the Wall Street Journal published an article detailing France's difficulties with its own state-run health care system.
[S]ervice cuts . . . are prompting complaints from patients, doctors and nurses that care is being rationed. That concern echos worries among some Americans that the U.S. changes could lead to rationing.
Generally, the WSJ knows what it's doing when it comes to economics. After all, it's the Wall Street Journal, and up until recently, Wall Street was the economic center of the U.S. However, they got it wrong in this article: we are already rationing health care. Any system designed to allocate scarce resources, by its very nature, rations those resources.
The question is not, then, whether ObamaCare would ration health care. We know it would. The question is instead whether ObamaCare would better ration resources better than the current system does.
Our current system rations health care (broadly speaking) according to the sick person's ability to pay. Thus, people effectively ration themselves. Obviously, we run into problems when ill people are unable to pay for their care, which is what led to the current cries for "free" health care.
On the other hand, government-run health care means that the government, rather than the individual, would be rationing medical benefits. As Thomas Sowell explains in Basic Economics:
Simply
waiting until what you want becomes available has been a common form of non-price rationing. This can mean . . . being put on a waiting list for surgery. . . . Luck and corruption are other substitutes for price rationing.
In addition, governments can ration health care by demographics. The elderly are often discriminated against when competing for scarce resources.
Thus, our choice is clear. Our current system rations according to individual choice, as demonstrated by ability to pay. Obama and the Democratic Congress proposes a system that will ration according to long wait lists, luck, corruption, and (most troublingly) demographics. The system we have now, however flawed it may be, is far preferable. When rationing health care, the free market is the only rational choice.