In a New York Times article entitled “Health Care Rationing Rhetoric Overlooks Reality” published on June 17, 2009, David Leonhardt writes the following:

Today, I want to try to explain why the case against rationing isn’t really a substantive argument. It’s a clever set of buzzwords that tries to hide the fact that societies must make choices.

In truth, rationing is an inescapable part of economic life. It is the process of allocating scarce resources. Even in the United States, the richest society in human history, we are constantly rationing. We ration spots in good public high schools. We ration lakefront homes. We ration the best cuts of steak and wild-caught salmon.

Leonhardt further goes on to quoting the famous economist Milton Friedman, who is a proponent of the free market system:

Milton Friedman’s beloved line is a good way to frame the issue: There is no such thing as a free lunch. The choice isn’t between rationing and not rationing. It’s between rationing well and rationing badly. Given that the United States devotes far more of its economy to health care than other rich countries, and gets worse results by many measures, it’s hard to argue that we are now rationing very rationally.

Yes, it is a fundamental fact of life that every scarce resource is being rationed somehow in the sense that someone doesn’t get everything that he might possibly want or need. Otherwise we’d all be driving Ferraris, flying private jets, vacationing on our own private yachts, etc. I totally get that because it’s obvious.

However, not all mechanisms of rationing are equivalent. Those opposed to health care rationing, don’t mean they oppose to just any old process of allocating scarce resources. They are specifically opposed to rationing by a governmental central authority, i.e. central planning.

Leonhardt quotes Milton Friedman, but somehow fails to mention that Friedman would be the first one to argue that central planning leads to the worst kind of allocation of resources possible. We need to introduce more free market forces into the health care industry to reduce costs. And let’s not pretend that the high cost of health care is somehow a failure of capitalism in this highly controlled, regulated, and litigated industry.