Rationing health care

Animal rights guru and bioethics prof Peter Singer writes:

The way we regard rationing in health care seems to rest on a similar assumption, that it’s immoral to apply monetary considerations to saving lives — but is that stance tenable?

He has a long article in the NY Times Magazine in favor of rationing health care, and spends most of it trying to justify applying monetary considerations.

His attitude is so bizarre. Everyone agrees that it is okay to apply monetary considerations to buying food, housing, transportation, or just about anything else, and yet we don't want those things to be rationed.

The presumption seems to be that if the govt subsidizes health insurance somehow, then there will be govt medical gatekeepers that will forbid certain medical procedures even if you pay for them yourself. That is how it works in Canada, and that is apparently in the Obama plan.

I just don't see why health insurance requires rationing. We have insurance for all sorts of other things -- cars, fire, etc. -- and nobody says those are rationed.

But a leftist jewish atheist academic bioethicist tends to have a really warped view of the world. I won't try to summarize his wacky views. Just look at his Wikipedia bio. Based on that, I would not be surprised if he thought that govts have a moral obligation to ration food, housing, cars, and everything else.