Equivocation about Rationing

In a number of recent speeches, President Obama promised to refute “misinformation” about the Democrats’ ideas for health insurance reform. At a Town Meeting in Colorado, for example, he addressed criticism that the proposed reform would lead to the rationing of care (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-By-The-President-In-Town-Hall-On-Health-Care-Grand-Junction-Colorado/). “When we talk about reform,” he said, “you hear some opponents of reform saying that somehow we are trying to ration care, or restrict the doctors that you can see, or you name it. Well, that's what's going on right now. It's just that the decisions are being made by the insurance companies.”

Mr. Obama’s argument suffers from the fallacy of equivocation. This fallacy consists in using a word in more than one sense. In this case, the word is “rationing”; Obama uses it to mean any scheme for allocating resources. The critics he is addressing, however, use it in a different sense. They mean the allocation of resources by government control. Or as the Wall Street Journal put it, “Yes, the U.S. ‘rations’ by ability to pay (though in the end no one is denied actual care). This is true of every good or service in a free economy and a world of finite resources but infinite wants. Yet no one would say we ‘ration’ houses or gasoline because those goods are allocated by prices. The problem is that governments ration through brute force—either explicitly restricting the use of medicine or lowering payments below market rates. Both methods lead to waiting lines, lower quality, or less innovation—and usually all three (‘Obama’s Senior Moment’, 14 August 2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203863204574344900152168372.html).”

The Logic Critic gives President Obama…

2 Blades - Wrong.