As reported in the Cleveland PlainDealer, former Alaska governor Palin is contributing to the incivility. She not only called the Obama health care proposal “evil” but made ridiculous claims about an Obama “death panel.”
When she asks, “Who will suffer most when they ration health care?”, she indicates her lack of basic economics understanding. Health care, like any economic (that is, scarce) good, is always rationed. In the present system it is rationed by the prices doctors charge, by the prices insurance companies charge and what they choose to “cover,” and by the jobs that do or do not provide health care coverage.
The current health care rationing system is patently unfair and uneconomical (see my blog below). My wife just said, “Evil is when a health care system arbitrarily lets people die because they can’t afford health care or can’t even get health insurance at any price.” That’s evil.
Any system that passes in the U.S. will always leave room for people to buy the level of health care and health care insurance they are willing and able to purchase. Even the present government-provided health care system for older people, Medicare, has that provision. No plan that provides health care opportunities for people who otherwise would be excluded by our present kind of system can be called evil.
Come on, Sarah. Distortion, fear-mongering, demagoguery: aren’t these truly evil?