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[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by LessinSF
If it is a strong argument for government intervention into the health care system at all, it is a strong argument for an approach such as Oregon's, not a national health care system. I don't have the statistics at my fingertips, but some extraordinarily large portion of our health care expenditures is spent on the last year of people's lives or futile efforts to keep them alive or extend their (often miserable) life my some incremental amount. What Oregon is at least trying to do is insert some cost-benefit analysis into health care decisions, i.e. don't spend $1,000,000 on a liver transplant for a 70-year old.

We are spending something like 20% of our GDP (or GNP, I don't know and it doesn't matter) on health care in some misguided belief that all efforts must be made at all times for all people. And some disproportionate amount of that is not spent on the stuff that most people want from health insurance, whether it is keeping the vegetative alive, using extraordinary attempts to save the old, infirm and feeble, or on all the machines in the ICU that go "beep."

Somehow the doctors, lawyers and religious right have created this systemic belief that no amount of resources should be spared to save one life on the margin. Oregon is at least looking at the marginal benefit for the expeniture of extraordinary costs. A national health care system would not. I don't know what exactly, but I have no doubt that it would instead create some other system with unintentional, yet existent, built-in incentives for inefficiency, graft, and incompetency. (See, e.g. the TSA).

Agreed, but Less -- you're going to have to accept that "fuckable" will never be included on the benefit side.