American Crossroads, a political action committee affiliated with Karl Rove and funded “almost entirely by billionaires,” has released a new ad taking shots at Rep. Ron Klein, D-Fort Lauderdale, for supporting health care “rationing,” a statement based on Klein’s vote in favor of President Obama’s health care reform bill earlier this year.
The claim that federal health care reform will lead to care rationing is a questionable one, because, as PolitiFact has noted, “there is rationing now and there would be rationing in the Democrats’ plan too“:
You can bet people who can’t get health insurance due to a pre-existing condition feel like there’s already rationing. Ditto for those who can’t afford health insurance. Proponents of the health reform plan — which seeks to provide basic coverage to everyone, regardless of whether they have a pre-existing condition — argue that it would clearly reduce that form of rationing.
You could spend an unlimited amount on health care that would have some chance of helping people, [Katherine Baicker, a health economics professor at Harvard University,] said. But we have a limited amount of public resources. And so decisions have to be made about how to prioritize to allocate those resources. The idea, she said, is to provide adequate, basic health care in a public plan. Above that threshold, she said, people with more money could buy extra care.
John Holahan, the director of the Urban Institute Health Policy Research Center, said he has not seen anything in any of the plans that will result in explicit rationing, but “if you define rationing as ‘people can’t get everything they want,’ it’s true. But it’s also true today.”
The ad:
