September 12, 2007

Well, now. The American Cancer Society, no longer content with its role of lecturing adults about the risks that they should (not) take, dietary and otherwise, now has announced that it will devote its entire advertising budget next year to promotion of a single-payer system for U.S. health care.

Maybe they've decided that their central message---don't smoke, get mammograms, and watch your weight---has outlived its usefulness. Or maybe everyone already knows those things. No matter. Or maybe they recognize that their institutional need is for more cancers, not fewer, as that would be the inexorable outcome of a single-payer (i.e., government) system. The Beltway has interest groups, not patients. The Beltway faces intense competition for budget dollars. And so single-payer systems, as day follows night, must impose rationing of care over time, meaning in the context of cancer that less treatment, not more, will be the actual outcome under a system that "covers" everyone.

And so voila! Less treatment, less preventive care, fewer new medicines allowed, etc.: Higher cancer death rates will be the order of the day. Who says that the do-gooders have no sense of irony?

Posted by Benjamin Zycher at September 12, 2007 08:19 AM

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