For months the health care debate has been raging…..and for months info has been flying at the people at an outstanding rate…..and for months the poepl are more confused and disillusioned than they have been in a long time.  Why is this?

Well first of all, it is very good for the health care opponents…they can say anything they like and the confused electorate will buy any argument…as long as it sounds like a BAD deal.  One such word is rationing.

I would like to help the readers understand the word and the debate….hopefully…my attempt will be successful.

The NT Times had an excellent report filed by David Leonhardt on rationing and excerpts are here:

Wait, are you talking about rationing medical care? Access to medical care is a fundamental right. And rationing sounds like something out of the Soviet Union. Or at least Canada.

The r-word has become a rejoinder to anyone who says that this country must reduce its runaway health spending, especially anyone who favors cutting back on treatments that don’t have scientific evidence behind them. You can expect to hear a lot more about rationing as health care becomes the dominant issue in Washington this summer.

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.

Health care, I realize, seems as if it should be different. But it isn’t. Already, we cannot afford every form of medical care that we might like. So we ration.

There are three main ways that the health care system already imposes rationing on us. The first is the most counterintuitive, because it doesn’t involve denying medical care. It involves denying just about everything else.

The rapid rise in medical costs has put many employers in a tough spot. They have had to pay much higher insurance premiums, which have increased their labor costs. To make up for these increases, many have given meager pay raises.

The second kind of rationing involves the uninsured. The high cost of care means that some employers can’t afford to offer health insurance and still pay a competitive wage. Those high costs mean that individuals can’t buy insurance on their own.

The uninsured still receive some health care, obviously. But they get less care, and worse care, than they need. The Institute of Medicine has estimated that 18,000 people died in 2000 because they lacked insurance. By 2006, the number had risen to 22,000, according to the Urban Institute.

The final form of rationing is the one I described near the beginning of this column: the failure to provide certain types of care, even to people with health insurance. Doctors are generally not paid to do the blocking and tackling of medicine: collaboration, probing conversations with patients, small steps that avoid medical errors. Many doctors still do such things, out of professional pride. But the full medical system doesn’t do nearly enough.

That’s rationing — and it has real consequences.

So the opponents of the Obama Health plan will use rationing as a way to try and prove that we will be separated from your doctor or that you will not be able to receive proper medical attention.  Both are not proven…both are scare tactics and as we know Americans are very suspectable to FEAR.  For that reason any health care programs will probably be watered down to be a mere reflection of what is needed and in all administrations to come will be methodically dismantled until we are back where we are now.