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Politics : A US National Health Care System?
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To: Mary Cluney who wrote (9263)9/10/2009 3:17:43 PM
From: Lane31 Recommendation  Read Replies (1) of 42652
 
A person with a bad lifestyle will (most likely) incur expenses that would otherwise not be needed.

A couple of problems.

I take your point about the added cost of the sequential removal of bullets but that assumes that bullet guy and bullet-free guy die of the same thing at the same old age. If bullet guy dies of his wounds the first, second, or even third time he's shot, his health care will cost less long term. I don't think your model sufficiently weighs the cost of care during ones seventies and eighties. Bullet guy saves that cost because he will die early, probably from one of the bullets. Bullet-free guy incurs two decades of old-age costs. So you have to compare the cost of servicing the dangers of the dangerous guy against the cost of servicing the costs of aging.

Your model also assumes there is not cost in preventing bullets. The guy who dies of old age has had bunches of colonoscopies and stress tests during his lifetime while his counterpart wasn't. So not only do you have the aging costs to weigh against the bullet-removal costs, you have the prevention costs. Sure, eating a healthy diet and not getting obese is prevention that can be undertaken without cost to the health-care system. But other prevention measures are costly and add up over a lifetime. Further, the proposal intends to add the cost of getting folks on a healthy diet to be part of health care services so you have to add in the cost of that.

I submit that old-age guy probably costs more than bullet guy over a lifetime. You're cherry picking your costs.
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