Some 95% of the personal woe in this world is self-induced, nowhere more so than the maintenance of personal health.
Well-care and preventive strategies are so much less expensive to cover than correcting damage already done, through either ignorance, sloth or outright stupid behavior. The care and feeding of the human body has some principles already well-known, and after the age of forty, if a person is not actively participating in a personal health maintenance regimen, including diet, exercise, and careful monitoring of limits on destructive impulses, there is little hope of living out the biblical three-score and ten (70 years of age, for those of you from Rio Linda). Of course, since life expectancy is now well above that for most demographics, that speaks well of how at least certain groups have accepted the responsibilities that go with enjoyment of good health.
When a person is younger, even gross negligence of matters of health, while challenging, leaves the individual still with sufficient margins of personal vitality remaining so recovery is both quick and relatively complete. But that reserve, once squandered, is not easily recovered, and the decline may set in rather faster than otherwise. Those pounds you pack on after age forty, tend to stay all the rest of your life. And with this additional body mass, a whole syndrome of problems are included, mostly at no additional charge. High blood pressure, onset of Type II diabetes, digestive and circulatory problems, and advanced deterioration of the skeletal structure are a few among many.
Just remember the Quality Adjusted Remaining Years (QARY) is going to be the cost-benefit paradigm that will be applied in the operation of the “death panels” in Obamacare, which we are told do not exist.
Yeah, and we are supposed to believe the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy DO exist, too.
How about unicorns and pixie dust?
I seem to remember Malthus, when he was busy demonstrating why poor laws never work because they encourage people at the margins to become dependent, excluding malingerers because there was presumably a limit. Dependency hopefuls wouldn’t break their own legs, presumably. Such failure of imagination. Not only did he miss how precise will become medical care and what trivial things we’ll subsidize, but also how long people will live and how after a certain age humans are like one big disease.