The Land of the Free

And I thought that in the United States we didn’t ration health care:

An insurance company that initially refused to pay for a liver transplant for a 17-year-old Northridge girl who died in a hospital should face criminal charges and pay civil damages, an attorney for the girl’s family said Friday.

In the real world, it’s not possible to have an insurance program that will pay for just anything. A private insurance plan will try to find reasons to avoid paying for anything that’s expensive. And it’s natural inclination to do this will be checked by the sloppy method of public outrage and lawsuits. A public program, by contrast, could operate according to an explicit budget constraint, with elected officials and the voters who vote for them in a position to make a choice about how much resources they want to dedicate to health care services rather than to other things. In either case, people with the means and inclination could step outside the insurance circle and purchase additional services.