WELL, YES: Health Care Is A Business, Not A Right:

“The health of Americans should not be a profit center. Health care is a right. Full stop.”

That comes from the Twitter feed of personal finance writer Helaine Olen. But it could have issued straight from the heart of any progressive in the land. Subjecting health care to the sordid whims of the marketplace strikes many people as simply immoral. Nor is this feeling confined to the left. Conservatives may be less enthusiastic about socialized medicine, but talk to one about the health care system, and there’s a good chance you’ll get a rant about greedy insurers nickel-and-diming hardworking consumers when they’re sick. Almost everyone feels that there is something fundamentally wrong about making money off of someone else’s illness.

Why do we feel this way? No, don’t sputter and tell me that it’s obvious, that people need health care. People need a lot of things. You’ll die without food long before you’ll die without health care, and yet few people say we need to “take the profit motive out of farming”. (There are some, to be sure, but this was never a widespread sentiment even when food was a lot scarcer and more expensive). Why is health care special?

Well, in part because politicians can make hay by pretending that it is. But the evolutionary psychology point that comes next is probably valid. But it’s just another one of those aspects of paleolithic-era tribal morality that don’t really work in a modern society — but that politicians eagerly exploit. And the denial can run deep:

Pointing out something the British health system can do that the American system can’t, and doing so in dryly factual tones, seemed like a good way to endear myself to the British audience.

The other guest, a British health official, interrupted to basically accuse me of lying; the British health system, he said, did no such thing.

Now I reiterate: I had not called NICE a death panel, or said that it was bad; I had simply described what NICE does, which is keep the NHS from blowing its budget on very expensive treatments that deliver relatively little value per pound spent. You can read NICE describing what NICE does on its website; the description is not significantly different from the one I gave. Being told that this was flat out wrong was surreal. Things got even more surreal when I began again to explain what NICE does, thinking that perhaps I had been unclear, and the host interrupted me and said something like “As you know, that’s false.”

Why such a strong emotional reaction to a boring factual statement? My conclusion, having read Hanson, was that people don’t want to think their health care system might let them die because it’s too expensive to keep them alive. They don’t like it any better when the government does it than when an insurer does — and so the government is at pains to suggest that cost is not a factor in their calculations.

But, you know, it is. Give Obama credit for some honesty saying that Grandma would just have to take a pain pill.