We’ll all suffer from this. And the effort to control costs by having a central authority that decides which tests and treatments are appropriate, and therefore eligible for government reimbursement, will have the opposite effect. Previous attempts at managed care have demonstrated this, and it will be even worse when the government is more actively involved.

The government will have to hire huge staffs of people without medical expertise, who sit in offices, without seeing patients, and challenge what trained physicians do. The physicians will have hire staffs of people to respond to these challenges. All those dollars, and all that time, could have been invested in patient care instead of providing jobs for a new class of bureaucrats.