Access to health care shouldn’t be issue

EDITOR:
David deMilo’s charges (Your Voice, “No angels of health care,” July 24) that President Obama has ginned the matter of health care into a crisis neglects the fact that health care costs are both an at-once and future drain on the economy. 
Whether or not some real good can be found in health care’s growing share of the economy, its cost will bankrupt not only individuals but the country. 
On the other hand, who can deny that merely extending medical insurance to all without constraining its use will only make a bad problem worse? After all, taxpayers will subsidize those who cannot afford medical insurance, and then they will use it like the rest of us. But that’s the price of a society where each citizen is equally valued. 
Access to insurance should not be the issue. Rather, its overuse, or more accurately open access to the best technology and care without concern for a better patient outcome or cost-benefit ratio, must be restrained.
In the worst instance, can we as a society continue granting a personal option to terminal patients and their families to choose any and all medical care? Can a president’s grandmother have a hip replacement with a prognosis of looming death from cancer? 
When society as an aggregate pays the price, eventually society and its proxies will decide what end-of-life care should be. 
Call it rationing. Call it cold, calculating or bureaucratic. It’s just a matter of time. Only the rich can have unlimited care. 
To call health care reform a success, we must collectively decide where on the margin enough is enough and be smart, efficient and price-conscious for everything else.