Socialist governments ration healthcare when demand exceeds supply—when there’s simply not enough money or medical resources available to provide health care services to all of the people all of the time. What they end up with is either coverage for all of the people some of the time, or for some of the people all of the time.

This sounds great to lots of people, mostly Democrats, until they think about being one of those whom the government decides is too old or too sick to get the rationed treatment. If the procedure or the treatment is too expensive, or if the state decides there’s a more qualified or more deserving candidate, you’re out of luck. In the name of “what’s good for the people,” you end up not getting what you need to stay healthy—or, in some cases, stay alive.

Often, these systems don’t allow you to buy that procedure or treatment on your own because that would be unfair to those who can’t afford it. “Why only the privileged classes would get quality healthcare, and the poor would go without, why that’s so selfish!”—which, in large part, is the motivation to have socialized medicine in the first place.

Consider that in Canada it’s now illegal for a doctor to provide services outside of the system. Which explains, of course, why you see so many Canadians in America getting healthcare.

All this makes perfect sense, or rather, perfect cents, from a purely rational choice/supply and demand point of view.

Now, let’s go to the next logical step.

Consider this past Sunday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi appeared on ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos and had the following exchange:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those—one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?

PELOSI: No apologies. No. we have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.

So, according to the person third in line for the presidency, spending money on contraception is a good economic stimulus because it will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government. After a public outcry, the contraception provision was dropped from the bill that passed the House on Wednesday, but the Speaker’s comments were revealing—and alarming.

The position that she articulated scares me.

It’s like something out of a science fiction movie. Continued...