Oregon intends to beat the feds with its own plan. Here is the letter I sent for testimony.
Senate Bill 770 eliminates private healthcare in Oregon. Medical guidance would flow through an unelected panel to a bureaucracy administering treatments allowed within government funding. Doctors and patients would conform to approved scenarios for treatment created to contain astronomical costs; costs causing California and Vermont to abandon the idea.
Princeton bioethics professor Peter Singer in the New York Times illustrated the best thinking for managing single payer healthcare. “Rationing health care means getting value for the billions spent by setting limits on which treatments should be paid for from the public purse….There’s no doubt that it’s tough – politically, emotionally, and ethically - to make a decision that means that someone will die sooner than they would have if the decision had gone the other way….The task of health care bureaucrats is then to get the best value for resources they have been allocated….If a teenager can be expected to live another 70 years, saving that life gains 70 years, whereas a person of 85 can be expected to live another 5 years, then saving the 85-year-old will gain only 5 life-years. That suggests saving one teenager is equivalent to saving 14 85-year-olds”.
Besides age, additional criteria can constrain costs. For example, we can measure intelligence, define mental illness and physical handicaps, and identify addictions. Overall the panel and bureaucracy would decide certain people make minimal or no contribution to society. The access to healthcare would be adjusted accordingly.
I would rather face the uncertainties of finding my own care.
I ask that this letter be included with testimony concerning SB770.
Why We Must Ration Health Care
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19healthcare-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Next up all guns that have a magazine over 5 rounds will be illegal in Oregon. The bill will require all Oregonians to register our "assualt" rifles, so they can keep a list of who owns them and begin the prosecutions.
It is hard to move especially when retired, but move we are and the states that are options are getting less and less, Costa Rica sounds more and more enticing.