A couple of weeks ago, Barack Obama stated, "I will not sign on to any health plan that adds to our deficits over the next decade. And by helping improve quality and efficiency, the reforms we make will help bring our deficits under control in the long term."  Does this sound suspiciously like a magic free lunch, relying on improved "quality and efficiency" - provided by the federal bureaucracy, no less! - to improve care while managing to keep costs constant?  It does to me!

Former Senator Tom Daschle sounded much more credible when he said, "Health-care reform will not be pain free," so stated when he was Obama's nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department.  For us to believe that Obama can come up with a pain-free government-run health care program is to believe in miracles, or in free lunches, which is actually the same thing.  To obtain the same level of service while providing it to, say, 47 million additional people (if you believe the liberal Democrats) who aren't paying for it - and they aren't, which is why they don't have it now - will cost billions, some say trillions, more dollars than we currently pay.  But it's a lot more likely, given the reluctance of the American taxpayer to pony up any more largesse for the non-paying segment of our society, that there will be no budget increase to pay for this health care plan.  That means we will have to find some other way to come up with all that extra money.

[Note to readers:  Daschle did say, "Health-care reform will not be pain free."  He did not say, "Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them."  This quote, widely attributed to Daschle by a chain anti-socialized medicine e-mail, was actually written by one Betsy McCaughey, a former Lieutenant Governor of New York and current adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in an article written for the Bloomberg News Service back in February.  McCaughey based her claim on what is in my opinion an accurate reading of Daschle's book, What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis, but it's paraphrased by her and not something Daschle actually uttered word-for-word.]

So how will this fabulous new plan be funded?  Well, if you can't pay with money, you usually pay with time or personal welfare or some other non-monetary currency.  There are a couple of ways this can happen, and if this new plan comes to pass, we'll probably see both of them.  First, health care consumers, faced with many more (47 million more if you believe the libbies) patients using a system that won't be any larger, since additional assets require additional funding, will now wait in line for popular procedures.  We've already seen this in Canada and the U.K., where common but necessary procedures such as hip replacements require waiting for two years, a procedure for which, in this country, the wait is typically three to four months.  Of course, medical care nominally costs less in those two countries, but on the other hand, the long waits for surgeries in those countries have resulted in a large increase in long-term disability claims due to bad hips, which offsets, to say the least, any resulting health care savings.

The other disturbing possibility is that, faced by long waits for common procedures, the government will simply deny health care to individuals for whom it is not deemed cost-effective.  The U.K., for example, has established "in England,10 Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs) [that] are responsible for health care in their region. This includes the development of strategies for health services in their local areas,ensuring quality and the appropriate capacity for different services."  This is a bureaucratic way of saying that if you're too old or too infirm, you're out of luck when it comes to getting medical services for which there is too much demand.

And Canadians, faced with demand for health services they can't satisfy, are quickly adopting the same strategy.  A Canadian friend of mine who now lives in the States, married to an American serviceman, provides the following story in an e-mail she sent me about her 80-year-old mother's struggle with the Canadian health care system:

"This [the health care rationing problem in Canada] is something we're aware of due to research on Mom's hip replacement in Canada.  They will wait-list the elderly to death rather than replace a joint or provide any other medical care for the elderly (on the premise they will die first and save that money) ...regardless of their good health otherwise.  Only the Doctor's fight with the system led to Mom getting her hip replacement done at about age 80.  This is not heresay...it happened to our family on this kind of health care system up in Canada.   Do whatever you can now to fight this [the Obama health care plan] getting support.  She has more than a decade (hopefully two!) of good health, other than her hip wearing out, to enjoy her grand & great grandchildren!"  Amen to that.

Although this story is just an anecdote, it reflects the trend in Canada towards rationing health care by denying services to the elderly, a trend we're sure to see in this country if the Obama plan is implemented.  So just remember, my fellow Americans, you get what you pay for, and you pay for what you get.  Right now, we've got Barack Obama.  Let's see if we can change that before he wrecks our health care system, too.