Editor's note. The following is the statement delivered at a press conference Wednesday by Burke Balch, JD. Director of NRLC's Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics.

At a Wednesday press conference NRLC's Burke Balch, JD, points to charts illustrating his argument against ObamaCare.

Since its inception, the pro-life movement has been as concerned with protecting vulnerable people with disabilities and older people from euthanasia as with protecting unborn children from abortion. We have long made clear our position that when the government effectively imposes limits on the right to obtain lifesaving medical treatment, this rationing is a form of involuntary euthanasia. Because of the rationing inherent in the Obama Health Care Law, we advocate its repeal.

The results of yesterday's election, with important gains in the number of legislators committed to repeal in both houses of Congress, bring us closer to that goal. Unfortunately, so long as President Obama remains in office, full repeal may not be possible. Realistically, repeal requires not only adequate support in Congress, but also a President willing to sign it. Thus, full repeal may depend on the outcome of the 2012 elections.

Fortunately, those aspects of the health care law that most threaten rationing do not go into effect until after 2013. In the interval, we will redouble our efforts to educate the American people about why the Obama Health Care Law, if not repealed, will force rationing.

We're confident most Americans do not believe that federal law should limit what private citizens can choose, out of their own funds, to spend on medical treatment to save the lives of their own family.

Yet the Obama Health Care Law does exactly that. Starting in 2015, its Independent Payment Advisory Board must submit "recommendations to slow the growth in national health expenditures" below the rate of medical inflation. The Obama Health Care Law empowers the federal Department of Health and Human Services to implement the Board's recommendations by imposing so-called "quality and efficiency" measures on hospitals, requiring them to report on their compliance. Doctors will also have to comply with these "quality" measures. If they don't, all qualified health insurance plans will be forbidden to contract with them.

Basically, health care providers will be told by Washington just what diagnostic tests and medical care they may give their patients – not only for federally funded programs like Medicare, but also for health care paid for by private citizens and their nongovernmental health insurance.

And these will be standards specifically designed to limit what ordinary Americans may choose to spend on health care so that they are not allowed to keep up with medical inflation. In effect, there will be one uniform national standard of care, established by Washington bureaucrats and set with a view to limiting what private citizens are allowed to spend on saving their own lives. The documentation for all of this, with exact quotes from the legislation, is posted on our website, www.nrlc.org.

Some argue that such limits are necessary because, they say, we cannot afford ever-increasing spending on health care. Yet a key Obama Administration official – Sherry Glied, the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation in the Department of Health and Human Services – has convincingly refuted this fear in her book Chronic Condition: Why Health Reform Fails.

What I am about to show you is data updated and expanded from that in Glied's book.

Many are troubled by the trends illustrated in charts like this, showing the significant rise in the percentage of the average family budget devoted to health care since 1940. Yet during that same period, the resources we have needed to devote to other essentials have declined, due to dramatic productivity increases, thus freeing up funds to use to increase spending on health care. The percent of the family budget needed for food, for example, has been cut almost in half-- even as our food's quality and variety has gotten better. If we combine food, clothing and shelter, because of productivity improvements their cost has dropped from over 50% to about 30% of the family budget.

The next chart shows something striking: the increase in health care expenditures as a percent of the average family budget is almost exactly equivalent to the decrease in expenditures needed for food, clothing, and shelter. In short, on average we are spending more on health care not because of some inexorable cost-push, but rather because long-term productivity increases in other sectors of the economy have freed up resources that have then been used to increase our life expectancy and to decrease the rate of death from cancer and heart disease. In other words, health care spending has increased largely because of demand-pull, not cost-push. While our economy certainly has its ups and downs, in the long term there is no reason to believe that we will not continue to increase our productivity, and hence continue to increase the resources we can afford to devote to saving lives and improving health.

Of course, I have been talking of averages and aggregates. However, both Assistant Secretary Glied's book and our website, www.nrlc.org, describe how a safety net for the uninsured might have been constructed without resort to the Obama Health Care Law's government-imposed limits on private health care spending and the rationing these entail.

America can afford excellent health care without rationing, and we are confident that informed Americans and their accountable leaders will bring about the repeal of the rationing-suffused Obama Health Care Law before it is too late.

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