Economic and ethical limits of medical care?

[T_aquaticus]

@jpm

I am just reminded that there is no perfect system and all make compromises, you just have to,pick your poison.

I can definitely agree with that.

[Mervin_Bitikofer]

@T_aquaticus

Nearly every other first world country has solved it. Why can’t the US?

We’re about to ‘unsolve’ it for them to the extent that our uniquely American living habits and entitlement attitudes manage to get exported to the rest of the world. There is no system in existence that will guarantee “the good life” to a population without somehow cultivating in that same population a sense of self-responsibility and health ownership (both conservative principals and both under increasing attack as such). It’s quite possible that other countries have more success with their systems because their populations don’t (yet) share quite so much in U.S. attitudes. We also have developed extreme political allergies to any system in which somebody somewhere gets more out than they put in. Others are willing to fight tooth and nail, and burn the country down to prevent that from happening (unless it’s themselves benefiting). Sorry for the cynicism … but … yeah. Train wreck. It could maybe be less of a train wreck, and I agree with you that the situation is better in, I guess, nearly any other developed nation.

[T_aquaticus]

@Mervin_Bitikofer

We also have developed extreme political allergies to any system in which somebody somewhere gets more out than they put in. Others are willing to fight tooth and nail, and burn the country down to prevent that from happening (unless it’s themselves benefiting).

That’s one of the trends I have seen as well. One person described it as Americans requiring its citizens to “earn” their healthcare.

On top of that, there is this ideology that free markets can cure any problem. Free markets can work quite well, but they don’t work well when there is a big discrepancy between supply and demand. When you have a product that people can literally not live without then free markets don’t work. This is why basic utilities are heavily regulated in each state. Imagine if power and gas companies could charge whatever they wanted in the cold winter months?

[03Cobra (Vance)]

Sometimes I wonder if the US experience is different because Americans are different. We are descendants of people who left other places voluntarily or were thrown out of the best countries in the world.

Some years ago I read that there was a genetic marker for such adventurers.

The ‘wanderlust gene’ – is it real and do you have it?

[mitchellmckain (Scientist and Christian)]

The difficulty of this question of how far we go and how much we spend is only going to get worse with with increasing medical technology. But frankly, it is worse if medicine becomes cheaper rather than more expensive because then population would rise dangerously.

I see this as a plus on the side of socialized medicine. This has to be a public decision. How can we decide that it isn’t economical any more to keep our relatives alive?

@Christy

I think American medical care is a train wreck. “The costs are paid by insurance,” means the costs are paid by the consumers.

My wife and I were on Obama care for a year and it bothered me that the government was paying this insurance company an amount greater than our income. That didn’t seem right to me.