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Originally posted by taxwonk
The solution to both SS and Medicare, at least in part, is simple, albeit brutal. Let more people die, and die younger.
Modern medical science has been obssessed for decades with chasing technologies and drugs that prolong life, simply for the sake of prolonging it. Why should a woman in her late 70's, with severely metastisized bone cancer, be given course after course of radiation and chemotherapy? So that she can live another five years in pain and waste away? The focus on such patients should be palliative care. And yet, this scenario is played out in every hospital in the country on a daily basis.
In a nation where we face an extreme shortage of donated organs, Mickey Mantle undergoes a transplant at a cost of over a million dollars to live another two years, while a 34 year-old father of three dies for lack of an organ.
Cardiologists are spending countless dollars on artificial hearts designed to work outside the body, passing along the cost to everyone in the health care system, so that terminal patients can spend months in the hospital while the rest of their organ systems slowly shut down. Why? Because we can.
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Old people are people, too, and I think helping them live longer is a good idea. At the same time, resources are finite, and we can't do everything. People object to rationing health care, but health care is rationed now, just in a half-assed, decentralized way. As always, RT has my proxy on this issue, and I'm hoping she'll come along and say something interesting about it.
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The biggest problem is that we are aging as a population, medicine allows us to extend that aging period, and we are producing less babies to shunt the bill onto, which is what has kept the system going lo these past three generations. Nobody is setting priorities in health care and as a result the money for grants and research is going towards subsidizing our fear of death, instead of improving the general population's overall health and saving those who still have lives to live.
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A falling birth rate is a problem in all industrialized countries, ours less so than most of Europe because we have more immigration. (There was a terrifying story in the New Yorker a few months ago about the coming decline in Russia's population, and the problems we can expect as a result.) What we need is government subsidies for sex.
Part of this problem, too, is that old people vote, and young people don't.
