Obama’s stupidly uninformed comments on the arrest of his Harvard professor friend distracted us from his other ridiculous gaffe: the accusation that doctors are taking out kids’ tonsils for no good reason. As with Gates-gate, Obama got it wrong. Tonsillectomies are less common than they used to be but are still essential for certain patients. In short, Dr. Obama is in no position to judge who’s getting the right tonsillectomy treatment and who’s not.

But there’s the rub: ObamaCare envisions a system in which government bureaucrats are going to be making that decision as well as millions of others. As the Wall Street Journal explains:

Mr. Obama seems to think that such judgments are easy. “If there’s a blue pill and a red pill and the blue pill is half the price of the red pill and works just as well,” he asked, “why not pay half price for the thing that’s going to make you well?” But usually the red and blue treatments are available — as well as the green, yellow, etc. — because of the variability of disease, human biology and patient preference. And the really hard cases, especially when government is paying for health care, are those for which there’s only a red pill and it happens to be very expensive.

Under the system Democrats are trying to ram through Congress, these case-by-case choices, currently made between patients and care-givers, will gradually be replaced by rigid government schemes.

So we shouldn’t personalize the criticism of  Obama’s medical illiteracy. It is not any failing of his. It is simply impossible for all medical knowledge and the needed wisdom and flexibility to treat 300 million people to be dispensed from Washington. That’s why we shouldn’t try. And that’s as good a reason as any to junk ObamaCare and start over.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 7:25 AM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.