One of the things overlooked in discussions about health care is that with a single-payer health system there is still a payer.
This payer (the government) will make decisions as to what it will spend money on. Sally Pipes, President, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy at the Pacific Research Institute, shows how this could be catastrophic for some of us:
Do people who are overweight or obese deserve health care? In the United Kingdom's socialized health care system, the answer appears to be "no." And if Democrats get their way, the same could be true in the United States.
To save money, the U.K. National Health Service recently announced it will ban obese patients from many surgeries for up to a year. Such rationing is standard in single-payer health care systems. Americans will face the same fate if Democrats can enact Medicare for All here.
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Known as "lifestyle rationing," the new British policy debunks the myth that single-payer systems deliver truly universal health care.
The rule applies to patients with a body mass index of 30 or higher. It would hit a 5-foot-10 man who weighs more than 209 pounds, or a 5-foot-4 woman who weighs more than 174 pounds. These patients will have to wait a year, or lose 10 percent of their weight, before they can receive elective surgeries like hip or knee replacements.
The National Health Service in Britain believes such discriminatory rationing is the "best way of achieving maximum value from the limited resources available."
Of course, overweight people aren't the only ones denied care in single-payer systems. The bureaucrats who run them have little choice but to ration care for everyone.
Democrats Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have made single-payer their party's orthodoxy on health care, and the failure (thus far) of the GOP to replace and repeal the Affordable Care Act has opened the way for them to promote this system.
I urge you to read all of Pipes' sobering article.