Every day medical groups such as Sutter Medical Group in Sacramento and Kaiser Permanente ration health care for all their members. For instance Dr. Surekha Reddy of Sutter requires a three to four week wait for routine appointments. Dr. Kathy Koh of Kaiser has a five month waiting list for cataract surgery. The Insurance company, Health Net, has a six month waiting list for a colonoscopy. Each of these examples illustrates a few ways that show insurance companies and medical groups routinely ration American health care. There are many more. Please add yours below.
A google search on "health care rationing" turns up thousands of stories demonizing the idea of national health care by claiming it will ration health care, as if it were not already massively rationed. There is not a single article pointing out how insurance companies currently ration health care.
This kind of lopsided, grossly biased reporting is hardly surprising. An effective single payer health care system modeled on Medicare would utterly destroy the trillion dollar annual income and multi-trillion dollar assets of corporate health care insurers and providers. You can bet your house that these people are spending hundreds of millions every year on massive propaganda and lobbyists to protect their entrenched money and power.
Against that are a few million individuals with no voice, little choice and the critical distractions of war, global warming, oil prices, and massive congressional, government, and corporate corruption coupled to the near-universal job insecurity caused by "outsourcing", threats of pay cuts and mergers.
When things like these threaten our lives, our economy and our freedom, health care rationing becomes a minor distraction. Just one more disgusting face of the corporate takeover and its massive assault on our standard of living and quality of life.
So it gets little notice when the near-monopoly insurance companies slash physician payments and medical procedure reimbursements once again. This rations health care by reducing the number of doctors to those who are willing to accept the low rates. Generally that means doctors and medical groups who practice "production line" medicine. It means your doctor no longer accepts your insurance card and you must find another health care provider. It means your doctor got his medical degree from - in the case of my choices for primary care physician at Kaiser - Bangladesh, Singapore, and Mexico among other countries. Rationing.
Health insurance companies routinely limit the amount they will pay for an injury or illness. In other words once you have used up your ration the insurance no longer pays. This kind of insurance company rationing is said to cause a huge percentage of all personal bankruptcies.