If you want to spend a half million dollars of your own money (or your children's inheritance) during the last month of your life, then have at it. The government should have no rules to prevent this. But tradeoffs have to be made somewhere when it's a question of spending government money to keep people alive for short periods at extraordinary cost.
Either get rid of socialized medicine or accept its limitations.
In a recent interview, David Goldhill, author of Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father had something interesting to say about the distortions caused by socialized medicine:
Many people think that, you know, if they're seniors, that Medicare is paying for their health care. What's interesting about seniors and what almost no one understands about Medicare is in 1965, when seniors paid for almost all of their health care themselves, roughly 10 to 12 percent of their income was spent on health care. This year, when seniors pay almost none of their health care themselves - Medicare pays 95 percent of the bill - that little 5 percent they pay now accounts for 20 percent of their income.
So what you have is people who think they're being protected by having these big intermediaries between them and the price of health care, in fact, what those intermediaries are doing is so inflating prices, so inflating demand, building so much waste and complexity into the system that all of us are bearing this extraordinary cost. We just don't see it because it's so many different hands into our pocket. But there is no other place for the money to come from.
BOOKbump
“Many people think that, you know, if they’re seniors, that Medicare is paying for their health care. What’s interesting about seniors and what almost no one understands about Medicare is in 1965, when seniors paid for almost all of their health care themselves, roughly 10 to 12 percent of their income was spent on health care. This year, when seniors pay almost none of their health care themselves - Medicare pays 95 percent of the bill - that little 5 percent they pay now accounts for 20 percent of their income.”
But the not often discussed issue is the escalation in the cost of healthcare. For me, and I am a senior, that is the issue. My mother took about 3 days to die in a local hospital. They did little more than keep her sedated to ease her passing. The bill $50,000! But since it was Medicare the hospital “forgave” 80% of the bill leaving about $10,000 of which Medicare paid 90%. I just read about an all expense paid 200 day cruise that costs less than $50k. You talk about the Banksters. I submit that the “healthcare administrators” put these guys to shame. We also should never have decoupled the patient from his healthcare bills.
Another factor that has changed dramatically is simply the capability of modern medicine to keep people alive in adverse circumstances. Going back 50 years I would guess that people died much sooner once they had failing health simply because there was nothing that could be done—unlimited budget or not. Now there is a lot that can be done, but naturally, at a cost.
You’re absolutely right. We have a socialized medical system, and we know socialism ultimately destroys itself, we have a socialized education system, and we know socialism destroys itself, etc. The government proposes to fix the very market distortions it created with more market distortions! Unfortunately, I really doubt anyone is going to do anything substantial to change the system until after the collapse. As the wealth redistributors love to say, “We’re a wealthy country!” Right? LOL!