Mickey Kaus at Slate.com in a post titled New Dem Health Care Pitch: “We’ll Deny Treatments!” expresses surprise that health care rationing is part of the plan for National Healthcare.

As the title of this post says, I’m surprised at his surprise. The only way that Obamacare will be able to cut costs is by curtailing service. Well, that and possibly controlling salaries. More on salaries in a minute.

Statistically, the last five years of life is when the highest amount of health care dollars are spent. As a society we place a high value on prolonging life, even if we don’t always prolong the quality of life. Other nations, particularly those with government run health care don’t do that. Whether it’s by system design or an unintended result of the long waits that seem endemic to socialized medicine, the effect is the same. People sometimes die while waiting for treatment. That happens in our system, particularly to those waiting for organ transplants. However, people who need diagnostic testing or treatments like cardiac catheterization don’t wait very long as a rule. Hip replacement surgery is usually elective, but the wait is usually less than a month. Not so in other countries, such as Canada.

Once the health care system is run by the government, it will be bureaucrats, not doctors, who decide who gets what care when. They will no doubt figure in the patient’s age, quality of life, expected longevity, and other factors when making those decisions. I can’t help buy think that very often, those decision makers will prioritize treatment decisions using different formulas than doctors currently do.

Mr.Kaus opines that politicians will be more susceptible to public pressure than private industry decision makers, but I think that this is flawed reasoning. The media will likely show incredible indifference to the suffering of individuals because they are invested in seeing that liberal administrations succeed. Without the media, pressure groups (also known as advocates) will have little or no traction. If you don’t believe that the media makes decisions like that based on politics, then look to see how much coverage the Tea Party movement gets in the Lame Stream Media. Look at how glowingly the LSM talks about Canadian and British health care. Then read the media in Formerly Great Britain and see what THEY have to say. Much different story in some of the media over there.

No Mr. Kaus, there will be pressure on politicians to fund expensive and often futile treatment. You’ll not hear a peep.

A bit about salaries. Pres. Obama and others in his administration have shown a proclivity for telling people not only how much of their salary they should be able to keep, but how much those salaries should be in the first place. They have told the top people at banks, insurance companies, and the domestic auto manufacturers that they make too much and will be making less in the future. The Treasury Secretary has said that not only CEOs of companies that accept federal loans will have their salaries set by the government, but that if he gets his way, so will those of institutions that have not received government aid.

If that comes to pass, you can be sure that CEOs of hospitals and doctors will be on the list sooner rather than later. If that happens, then there will be a trickle down effect as salaries for every position in health care has it’s salary set by someone from the government. I wonder what that will do to motivate people to go into deep debt to go through medical school? Will the answer be government subsidy of medical, nursing, and allied professional education? Will the answer be to set tuition, and thus salary levels, at the schools that offer that education?

I can see no good coming from the government taking over the funding and operation of the medical profession. Not one bit of good.

National Health Care, the efficiency of FEMA, the compassion of the IRS.