The Wall Street Journal editorial board goes back to the future in the fight against health care reform with this remix of Betsy McCaughey’s false claim about the Clinton health care plan:

ObamaCare so dramatically expands government control of health care that eventually all medicine will be rationed via politics.

But unlike McCaughey, whose claim that people would not be able to purchase health care services outside the Clinton administration’s proposed system of managed competition was demonstrably false, the WSJ is making a slippery slope argument that can’t be disproven. Nonetheless, it’s absurd. Does anyone outside the WSJ think that “all medicine” in the US will be rationed?* Note that doing so would require government to bar people from privately contracting for medical services. That is extremely unlikely to happen regardless of whether the health care plan in Congress passes or not.

Later in the piece, the WSJ goes on to make the point that cost controls on spending in Medicare and the public option are inevitable:

As Congress’s balance sheet drowns in trillions of dollars in new obligations, the political system will have no choice but to start making cost-minded decisions about which treatments patients are allowed to receive. Democrats can’t regulate their way out of the reality that we live in a world of finite resources and infinite wants. Once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, medical rationing is inevitable—especially for the innovative high-cost technologies and drugs that are the future of medicine.

It’s certainly also possible, as the WSJ implies above, that similar limitations will be placed on regulated private health insurance plans at some point in the future. However, these scenarios still fall short of supporting the claim that health care will have been “nationalized” or that “all medicine will be rationed via politics,” both of which imply total government control of the health care sector.