Mike Nichols in the St. Paul Pioneer Press...

connected the dots rather ably this weekend:
If we're going to expand -- greatly -- the government bureacratic class to administer these new healthcare programs, do we really continue to trust the doctors' evidence to tell us who is eligible, and who is not?

...
At least some folks in the police department and at Milwaukee City Hall didn't want the pension board, which handles disability claims there, to pay the guy. Unfortunately, it wasn't their call. It was up to the doctors — and the doctors said, in essence, give the guy the money.

So they gave him the money.

Which is how things work.

I hadn't thought about that case until the other day, when the Associated Press reported allegations that doctors in Madison were handing out medical excuses to protesters who were taking time off work.

Something, on the other hand, should be alarming all of us. Doctors allegedly writing notes for protesters might not have a big financial impact, granted.

Generally speaking, however, doctors all across the country determine who gets an enormous chunk of public (not to mention corporate) money. They determine when a back injury is really disabling; they tell us when depression is real. We have no choice but to rely on them to, in essence, give away our money only to people who need it. More and more and more people, we are told, need it.

The federal Social Security Disability Insurance program alone, for instance, pays out about $124 billion per year to some 10 million Americans — many of whom are also eligible for Medicare, according to the Congressional Budget Office. At the current rate of claims, many of which are the result of medical diagnoses, the trust that pays the bills (and, in turn, gets revenue from payroll taxes) will be exhausted by 2018.

We see that a lot with mental health disability claims in northern Wisconsin: where there are less providers, it's not like Madison, where sometimes it seems there's a psychiatrist on every corner, eager to diagnose new business clients.

If the same person couldn't find a medical health provider to classify him as such up here, is it really fair, or consistent, for a perhaps more liberal, and generous doctor to complete the paperwork down in Madison, necessary to enable a person to collect benefits?

Remember: you get to choose your own docs to qualify you for these things, or if you don't have the money, only then will a local government-paid doc be provided to diagnose you... or not, as the case may be.

Perhaps the system ought to be changed, sooner rather than later, before we qualify new beneficiaries that will be almost impossible to boot from the system?

Because you'd hate to see this too further turn into a "who you know" connections kind of thing...