Originally Posted By: Kruse
Originally Posted By: Gary Allan
They blame it on a number of things ..but it doesn't alter the fact that a $25 xray is now $150 on a technology that's way older than I am. More health care facilities and providers increases the cost of health care.
About the only free market aspect to it is that professionals will flock to where the money is.
Once must remember another reason that health care has drastically gone up in the last 100 years is that people live longer. In 1910, you'd be lucky to make it to the age of 50 before you died. If you got a heart attack, cancer, have your appendix burst or have a blood clot, you usually died quite quickly. A lot of disease are now treatable and now with people living well past their 80's, you have a lot more health care to pay for. My grandma recently died at the age of 104. Had she died 40 years sooner, there would have been a lot less medical costs needed during her life. Somebody's got to pay for all this. A person who is in their 80s will also need a lot more medicine than somebody in their 40s. Medicine also costs a lot of money.
Our government can skewer a statistic any way they please. This is another reason they can hold up a chart of health care costs from many years back and show everybody how health care has gone up over the last few years. Except today the chart will show how greedy a doctor is, how a for-profit hospital is screwing us or how a medicine company charges too much money for some medicine they spent 10 years of trial-and-error testing to finally get approval for.
I agree to most of what you're saying ..but one must ask to what gain and at what cost to the society? While I surely wish everyone here, regardless of age, every second of every minute of life that they're due, we've only focused on extending life as long as possible, not necessarily extending the quality of life. They still leave that to the individual. We're mostly altering genetics with environmental influences.
We're seeing the stress of this in everything. Our cars are the same way. We'll soon have the safest cars that no one can afford to buy. It's mostly a byproduct of people who deal in these things ..knowing when to stop. How much did the first evolution of car seats reduce infant/toddler deaths? Greatly. How much has/have the many ...MANY evolutions since? Not so much. Apply that to ambulances, firetrucks ...defibrillators ..air bags ..side door beams...curtain bags ..
While I never would affix a value to any single human life, we've got to face the facts that there's no endless blank check on the other end of it.
The last thing I need is more dwell time in my least enjoyable and least productive years ..especially at the cost to my society. Now if someone selflessly feels that my life is worth all the effort and wants to extend it just because they think I'm a really valuable artifact ...fine.
