When You're Worth More Dead Than Alive

By ERIC SINGER, Investor's Business Daily "Viewpoint", Posted 08/14/2009

The resounding "success" that Democrats are citing with the Cash for Clunkers program just goes to show that if you're giving away a billion dollars in the name of mumbo-jumbo environmentalism, you can do it in a week rather than five months as planned, and that people will be just as happy to take $3 billion dollars as $1 billion dollars.

The program gives cash incentives of up to $4,500 for people to trade in perfectly serviceable old cars for new cars with slightly greater mileage, all in the name of stopping global warming.
There's only one catch in the charade: recycling old cars and old car parts would, if honestly accounted for, result in less environmental damage when measured by the energy used to make the new cars and scrap the old ones.

Dishonest Politicians

At the same time we're stuffing money into car buyers' pockets, President Obama and Congress have been loudly pursuing health care reform that will insure (1) an additional 46 million Americans and illegal immigrants, (2) lower costs, (3) provide better treatment, (4) be paid for only by those making more than a million dollars a year, (5) eliminate fraud, (6) continue the parade of malpractice lawsuits, and (7) get us all to consistently exercise and diet — all without changing what we already have and no new doctors or nurses.

It is truly a miracle, just like the budgeted Cash for Clunkers, which took almost a full week to run out.  Talk about cost controls.

In fact, the real health care problem is that Medicaid and Medicare have trillions in unfunded future liabilities that cannot be met.  If these programs continue in their present form, they will require rationing.

Our politicians have been disgracefully dishonest about the Ponzi element of Medicare and Medicaid.  But rationing is something that is done to you, not by you.  And the ever-greater government presence in health care makes rationing inevitable with the present system. 
In the Great Stimulus of 2009, the first marker of rationing was planted with the establishment of a Comparative Effectiveness Review process.  First the data, then the application.  This program, which starts as a "study," is patterned after England's NICE board review of the cost-benefit analysis of treatment.  Rhetorically, this should be good news, because it implies that government should care about benefits vs. costs.  But it is only the patient who suffers the review.

Using the concept of a "Quality-Adjusted Life Year" — which in England is worth about $50,000 — a year in which you are bed-ridden is considered half-wasted.  So if a treatment would leave you bed-ridden for a year, that QALY would be $25,000. And if it cost $40,000, you would be denied. There are many factors that go into the calculation, but this shorthand is good enough.

The fundamental problem here is that government views all wealth as government property, to be doled out against cost-benefit analysis.  But the government doesn't create the wealth; it just seizes it by taxation.

Having relentlessly thwarted a truly free market in health care, the government treats each patient as a liability to be managed.  Once the government has a number in mind for the value of your life, your days will be numbered — and not by God, but by the government.

What happens when you are worth more dead than alive?  What happens when the cost of your treatment exceeds the QALY rating on your life?  You won't get meaningful treatment, but you will get some aspirin.  That's the way it is in England and to an extent everywhere else medicine has been socialized.

Throwaway People

Once you are a number, you are only a number.  If you are collecting Social Security benefits from the government, as the government overspends, these too will start to look like additional "savings" to the government if you are denied treatment.

Perhaps your pension will be saved as well, if you happen to be a government employee.  It very quickly turns out, especially in hard times, that you are less of a burden to the government if you promptly die the day after you retire.

The new law also contemplates end-of-life counseling.  With this approach, it is only a matter of time before your children will be offered bounties for persuading you to take an early exit. 
So now we've come full circle.  As the government completes its gradual takeover of the auto and health care industries, we begin to learn the new truths: old cars are disposable, old people are disposable, the Constitution is disposable, the country is disposable.

The only thing that is not disposable is the government.  Is there something wrong with this picture?

• Singer is manager of the Congressional Effect Fund, which seeks to avoid political risk by investing in the equity market only when Congress is on recess and by investing primarily in interest-bearing instruments when Congress is in session.

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