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Tony Rubolotta
Valuation of Biological Units
November 23, 2009
ObamaCare, regardless of its final version, is a framework for a
bureaucracy like most laws passed by Congress. Regulators will write all
of the rules, procedures, guidelines and details in accordance with the
requirements of the enabling law. Congress will later vote to accept or
reject those regulations. A Congress that can’t be bothered to read a
1,000+ or 2,000+ page bill they propose to make law is not likely to
read the 10,000 to 30,000 pages of regulations, forms, diagrams and
interpretive guides they will vote to make law.
Those regulations will expand in subsequent versions as the regulators
find and close loopholes, assume broader powers and attempt to meet
budgetary restraints. Almost immediately, the regulations will be beyond
the ability of most citizens to understand or read because of the sheer
volume, incessant cross-references, invented language and legal
language. Those regulations will become the province of lobbyists
focused on specific aspects related to the special interests they
represent. Public hearings on proposed regulations may be open to the
public but public attendance, unless you have an extraordinary amount of
free time and are willing to be humiliated by smarter than you
regulators, will be a sham. Note that such public hearings will not
entertain any suggestion the law is a failure no matter how badly it has
failed. The operating premise is that no matter how bad the law is in
principle, it can be "fixed” by the regulators.
Like all such legislation passed to create the alphabet soup agencies,
only those entities with large resources of money and people will have
the time for analysis and input. Those interests consists mostly of big
business, big labor and advocates of big government. Their objective is
to carve as much money from the regulations as the budget will permit
and to gain an advantage over competing interests. Their objectives will
be disguised and cloaked with buzzwords like "options”, "choices”,
"quality”, "efficiency” and "compassion” in order to market their
proposals.
A necessary part of any program that interferes with or eliminates free
market controls are artificial controls, specifically rationing, and
most likely followed by wage and price controls. Rationing must be
written into the regulations to provide regulators with rules and
guidelines because funding is not unlimited. Those regulators charged
with enforcing the rationing rules are appropriately called "death
panels” because that is what they will decide, who will get care and who
will not. Rationing priorities must be established and at least assume
some semblance of reason. Cost and benefit analysis is the model
suggested, but rest assured politics will be the overriding criteria.
Cost and benefit analysis is entirely fitting with the leftists view
that people are biological units endowed with certain abilities and
needs that constitute the benefits and costs to the state. The higher
the ratio of benefit to cost compared to the cost of care, the higher
the priority in the rationing order. Age, talents, general health and
numerous other factors will go into this formula, that is until the
formula yields politically inconvenient results. Voter demographics and
political correctness will determine the appropriate "fudge factors”.
At the very bottom of the list will be any unborn children with any kind
of defect the state views as a long term liability. If the regulators
see a voter demographic that will permit abortion in certain cases, that
will be the only choice offered the mother when it comes to health care.
The regulators are not concerned with morality but with a budget and
what is politically possible. The budget the regulators are looking at
is not just immediate costs, but long term costs as well. All the
marvels of creative government accounting and data processing will be
applied to determine eligibility for survival.
As for funding voluntary abortions, that will come too, not through
regulation but through judicial fiat. The court will reason that if
abortion is a legal right, then government programs cannot withhold the
means of exercising that right, or distinguishing it from any other
right granted under the purview of health care. If you are entitled to a
boob-job for self-esteem, you are entitled to an abortion for the same
reason. That is all it will take to torpedo any anti-abortion provisions
of the law.
How rationing will affect each of us individually is not difficult to
predict based in part on simple logic and in part on political
correctness. Where do you fit? Being an old white guy of European
descent and Christian belief, I know I have to be very near the bottom
though I may be partially redeemed by my productivity. It really depends
on whether or not my abilities exceed my needs and how that squares with
more politically correct applicants.
We may fool ourselves into believing rationing can be eliminated if we
simply increase the health care budget, but that can only happen if we
increase our overall wealth or reallocate our government spending
priorities or both. Our debt is increasing and will continue to
increase, so it becomes a matter of how much more we can borrow from
other nations before they cancel our credit card. The fact is we are not
producing wealth but destroying it. Our government spending priorities
can be changed, but that will depend on political feasibility. We could
eliminate our military and be healthy but defenseless. Some on the left
would welcome that. We can shuffle money from one program to another,
but that is entirely a political calculation.
A nanny state populated by so many children with a shortage of producing
adults may have the best intentions but will never have the means. The
biological units must be content with what gifts mommy can produce,
borrow or steal, and that pool of resources is drying up. |
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