When it was common for a doctor to visit the sick’s home and order, “Take two aspirin and call [...]]]> Health needs have existed longer than there has been an American medical industry. People have died of cancer and heart disease far longer than we have known of their existence. So what has changed? Technology.

When it was common for a doctor to visit the sick’s home and order, “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning,” aspirin was the state of the medical art. How ridiculous would it seem if the people of that age complained that access to aspirin was a basic human right, to be provided by the government at taxpayer expense? How ludicrous would it have seemed if someone would have suggested that we all pay taxes to hire people to buy the aspirin from Bayer and then deliver it to us for “free”? That generation would have wrinkled their noses at such a suggestion and said, “No thank you, I can buy my own aspirin.”

The only difference is that Bayer, and others in the industry, took the profits and invested them in the future. Little did they realize that once they expanded our medical knowledge, their efforts would be demonized and labeled evil.

Think what might have happened if the “progressives” could go back and “fix the oversight” or our founders and included life, health care, and the pursuit of happiness in the original inalienable rights. We would still be having 15 kids a generation, several of which would die before they were old enough to have kids of their own. We would still be amputating limbs as a method of fighting infection. There would be no cat scans, dialysis, open heart surgery, Botox, or Lasik eye surgery.

OK, so maybe there would have been the last two. Interestingly enough, Botox and Lasik have gotten cheaper and better, more people are getting them with fewer side effects, all without government mandate. They are generally not covered by insurance and people generally pay for them out of their own pocket. They are now more available and the prices are going down as competition for patients increases. Procedures covered by Medicare, on the other hand, are more expensive and fewer Doctors are providing them to Medicare patients who are also increasing in number.

In order to limit expenses all known socialized medical systems in the world ration treatment and drugs. President Obama suggests that we can save $500 Billion in Medicare by simply refusing to pay doctors once the lower amount is reached, in other words by rationing procedures once we have spent $500B less than before. If we only buy a few of something, we can limit what we spend on that something. This has an additional affect on the research industry which further limits costs: There will be no new drugs or treatments. Sure, there will be the occasional discovery by a housewife who mistakenly mixes the last few drops of her old brand of fabric softener with a healthy dose of her latest choice and discovers that her skin cleared up after exposure to the green cloud coming from the washing machine. Give me enough orangutans with typewriters and enough time and one of them will accidentally type out the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Some of you don’t know what typewriters were. They were like laptops running Microsoft Word with the printer built in, only noisier and less likely to spontaneously produce the Declaration of Independence or auto-morphed emoticons.

The problem with rationing access and stifling development of new technology is that these are exactly the problems we are told such efforts will solve. We complain that not everyone has access to treatment, then calmly discuss rationing. Then we complain that new drugs cost too much while ignoring what it would cost to research new ones in government run labs staffed with government employees overseen by Congress.

If we could go back, would we freeze health care at a level available 40 years ago? There was no arthroscopic surgery, no cat scans, and no contact lenses. We would not have witnessed the last fatal case of Smallpox. No? How about only 30 then? We still loose MRI’s, implanted cardioverter defibrillators, and laser eye surgery. There would be no Hepatitis B vaccine. No, want to keep those? At 20 years we loose several cancer treatments and a vaccine for Lyme disease and in the last ten we loose more cancer treatments and the advances in stem cell research. These are only a small example of the progress, (not the stuff of the progressive movement but the other direction) made in medicine over this time period. Just think what we will know tomorrow.

My question, then, is why now? Why is this the right time to stop advancing medicine? Why is now the time to limit access to future levels of quality health care by future generations so that we can claim to offer universal access to most everyone now? How ridiculous and ludicrous will we seem in 40 years when they look back and ask what were we thinking when we tried to eliminate the system that, although it does not offer all levels of treatments to everyone, it constantly adds to the list of treatments that are available to everyone. No one goes without aspirin or an X-ray for that matter because they cannot pay. One day, no one will pay for stem cell therapy. Only after the rich buy it first, and then those with “Cadillac Insurance Plans”, and then common off-the-shelf plans, and then uninsured people who pay cash. Just like aspirin and X-rays.