Check out this new editorial from National Review, which openly praises the rationing of health care by the private sector -- but worries about the government doing it:

But there are many good reasons to prefer rationing by price to other forms of rationing, which is why we use it for most products and services. Those reasons are not limited to efficiency, though they include it. The rationing involved in a free market is decentralized, creating more room than a bureaucratic system for people to make different trade-offs. Hence most people do not think of it as rationing at all.

It follows that it is a deep mistake to imagine the wonders of greater government involvement absent rationing. Greater government involvement necessarily means that the government will play a larger role in the allocation -- the rationing -- of care.

On the subject of Sarah Palin's fear of government "death panels," the editorial simultaneously says this is a stretch -- but also that we should be worried about the government denying care to the elderly:

To conclude from these possibilities to the accusation that President Obama's favored legislation will lead to "death panels" deciding whose life has sufficient value to be saved -- let alone that Obama desires this outcome -- is to leap across a logical canyon. It may well be that in a society as litigious as ours, government will err on the side of spending more rather than treating less. But that does not mean that there is nothing to worry about. Our response to Sarah Palin's fans and her critics is to paraphrase Peter Viereck: We should be against hysteria -- including hysteria about hysteria.

The state remains a dangerous servant and a terrible master, all the more so when it is also our HMO.