An Introduction to Covert Rationing
ANYONE CAN UNDERSTAND WHY our society, faced with the necessity of rationing healthcare, might opt to do it covertly. Trying to visualize how we might conduct open rationing is enough to give us nightmares. Just imagine: There, on C-SPAN, in some Congressional hearing room, the American Heart Association is squaring off against the American Cancer Society in the battle for dollars. Later, tune in to watch a group of women with breast cancer testify as to why they should get funding priority over those children with leukemia sitting at the next table.
As we will see in a later post, open healthcare rationing doesn’t have to be that bad. Nonetheless, open rationing is something we Americans are not willing to contemplate. And this leaves us no alternative but to ration covertly.
In this section of the book, we embark on a survey of covert healthcare rationing as it operates in the U.S. I am confident that when we are finished, any lingering doubts we might have about the Fourth Corollary - that covert rationing corrupts everything it touches - will have been abolished. We begin, in this chapter, with a brief overview of covert rationing, including an introduction to the main players in the battle over how covert rationing is to be conducted in the U.S. and who gets to control it.
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