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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (89829)	10/13/2008 1:06:28 PM
From: thames_sider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542026

Similar to what we have in the UK, then? The NHS is tax-funded, with uniform treatment although you can generally buy a few perks in hospitals: but if you want to pay (or insure) and go private, generally only available in cases of optional or non-critical treatment anyway, then that's fine. The problem with this model is still the same as Medicare, if I read it right. Treatment of people who are increasingly old in increasingly costly: plus with more old consumers and fewer young payers it's correspondingly harder to fund. I don't see any easy solution to this, BTW. It costs more and more to keep people alive as they get older (not so much the age itself but because disease and injury hit so much harder and they find recovery so much slower), and this trend basically can't continue indefinitely. Encouraging the very old to join death-worshipping cults or otherwise welcome the end of their lives is still a bit too callous, even by my standards, so I don't know what else to suggest that's palatable...