This video has gotten more than 1,000,000 views on YouTube. It deserves one more: yours.

One of the most disturbing things about the current health care debate is that some Republicans are positioning themselves as defenders of Big Government Medicare and against efforts to trim the program’s costs.

Yet the taxpayer costs of Medicare are expected to more than double over the next decade (from $425 billion in 2009 to $871 billion in 2019), and the program will consume an increasing share of the nation’s economy for decades to come unless there are serious cuts and reforms. Even the Obama administration talks about “bending the cost curve” to slow the program’s growth.

Yet Republican National Committee chairman, Michael Steele, takes to the Washington Post today to defend Medicare against any cuts, while at the same time criticizing the Democrats as “left-wing ideologues:”

• “Under the Democrats’ plan, senior citizens will pay a steeper price and will have their treatment options reduced or rationed.”
• “Republicans want reform that should first, do no harm, especially to our seniors.”
• “We also believe that any health-care reform should be fully paid for, but not funded on the backs of our nation’s senior citizens.”
• “First, we need to protect Medicare and not cut it in the name of ‘health-insurance reform.’ ”
• “Reversing course and joining Republicans in support of health care for our nation’s senior citizens is a good place to start.”

Steele uses the mushy statist phrasing “our seniors” repeatedly, as if the government owns this group of people, and that they should have no responsibility for their own lives.

Fiscal conservatives, who have come out in droves to tea party protests and health care meetings this year, are angry at both parties for the government’s massive spending and debt binge in recent years. Mr. Steele has now informed these folks loud and clear that the Republican Party is not interested in restraining government; it is not interested in cutting the program that creates the single biggest threat to taxpayers in coming years. For apparently crass political reasons, Steele defends “our seniors,” but at the expense of massive tax hikes on “our children” if entitlement programs are not cut.

The Boston Globe reports that Massachusetts now has the highest insurance premiums in the nation. The average family premium for plans offered by employers in Massachusetts was $13,788 in 2008, 40 percent higher than in 2003. Over the same period, premiums nationwide rose an average of 33 percent. And, according to the Commonwealth Fund, an annual family premium in Massachusetts is expected to hit $26,730 by 2020. Meanwhile CNN hails Romneycare as the model for the nation…

When government is paying the medical bill, it inevitably has to “ration” care. Choices obviously have to be made by whoever is paying, but there’s good reason not to leave government with the dominant decision-making power, as in Great Britain.

There’s no need to demonize British care. All one has to do is point out how government fiscal objectives so often run against good patient treatment. And how most people have no exit to a better alternative.

Consider this rather amazing story from the Daily Telegraph:

Doctors have launched a campaign on behalf of a war hero who has been told he must go blind in one eye before he can receive NHS treatment and accused Gordon Brown of “incompetence” in managing the health service.

More than 120 doctors have sent £5 cheques to Downing Street, made out to the Prime Minister, in the hope of shaming him into helping former RAF bomber Jack Tagg. The 88-year-old was recently diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in Britain, which affects an estimated 500,000 people.

Mr Tagg has the treatable, but most aggressive “wet” form of the disease, which can lead to the loss of central vision in as little as two months.

But he has been told that the NHS will only fund the injections which could save his sight, after he has lost the vision in one eye.

… “They told me there were three choices: let nature take its course and go blind, try to seek funding, or pay for immediate treatment. Time is of the essence, so we opted to pay up and fight for funding.

“This is happening to literally millions of people. It’s appalling and something has got to be done about it.”

The American medical system needs reform. But that should be accomplished by promoting patient-directed care, with individuals and families, rather than government, deciding how best to use scarce resources when it comes to medical treatment.

That’s Dic​tio​nary​.com’s fourth definition of the verb “to ration,” and it is essentially the same as the other three.

Here’s an example of government restricting the consumption of medical care. It comes from a strange, faraway land called “Oregon.”

A fun video on “free” health care in Canada:

Don’t believe everything you read at The Plank — including the part about Sarah Palin’s “death panel” claim being a “lie.”

Palin’s claim was a tad hyperbolic, but that does not change the fact that — as I explain in the Detroit Free Press — President Obama has proposed a new government panel that would enhance Medicare’s ability to deny care to the elderly and disabled based on government bureaucrats’ arbitrary valuations of those patients’ lives.