What if they don't have the money for even minimal care. Do we let them die at 40- if that's what fate or god "intends". I get what you are saying- I think it's ridiculous to do hip replacements on the taxpayer's dime on folks in their 80's and 90's- we need some sort of metric for usefulness- but how do we do that? Do we use actuarial tables? I'm not sure how we do this. And of course we'll be accused of death paneling- which is what we do already, by neglect. It's just easier to do the whole death panel thing by doing nothing, and just letting people die because they are poor, or underinsured, than it is to interfere, and make judgments based on age, or something else.
If you let people choose coverage, people will make mistakes- do you let people make those for their children? And we just let the kids die if the parents guessed badly. How about with people? Let 'em die, if they did the calculations wrong? We just watch them die- no treatment?
IMO it gets really ugly when you start seeing people you know die of curable problems, because they read a policy wrong, or guessed wrong about their odds of getting cancer, or some other disease. All Western countries, except the US, have some sort of national health care, so these things don't happen- because they are so ugly and so corrosive to well being. Paying for a mistake with cash is one thing. Making people pay with their lives is something else. |
