Alberto wrote somewhat humorously but somewhat seriously.
> >
> The problem is: I suspect whenever health care policies
> exist. Either if they are controlled by evil baby
> eating capitalists and their hordes of lawyers, or by
> bureaucratic g*vernments that think that one million
> deaths is just statistics.
>
Zimmy can correct me, but what I think the problem is/was/and will be again/
is that we are spending an increasing fraction of our resources on medical
care and the top isn't in sight. That was slowed down by managed care, but
that savings seems to be eaten up now, and medical inflation is rising
again.
My brother-in-law told me about a decade ago that there were cases where he
personally coded "brought back from a stopped heart" a patient on a daily
basis. We have the technology to spend hundreds of thousands per person per
year prolonging their lives. Indeed, IIRC, 40% of medical costs in the US
are in the last 8 weeks of life.
Someone somewhere has to decide where the limit is. We cannot spend all of
the GDP on medical care. When this happens, people get hurt and people die.
Since we are not up front about the costs of prolonging the last weeks of
life, the costs gets added to the cost of everything else. And, decisions
are made in every system, but the decision process is not up front because
we don't want to look the problem straight in the eye.
Dan M.
