All the intellectuals in the US who are officially deemed to be very smart people are officially telling us that the big problem with health care, the reason your Obamacare bills are going out of sight, is that keeping Grandma alive for a few months longer can cost unlimited amounts of money
As you doubtless know, most government health care systems around the world wind up murdering Grandma to free up beds: “Prolonged deep sedation”; “The Liverpool Care Pathway”.
To rationalize this, as we in the US increasingly move towards a government healthcare system, everyone is telling us that grandma is causing out of control health costs.
People 65-79 (9 percent of the total population) represented 29 percent of the top 5 percent of spenders. Similarly, people 80 years and older (about 3 percent of the population) accounted for 14 percent of the top 5 percent of spenders (Chart 2, 40 KB).2 However, within age groups, spending is less concentrated among those age 65 and over than for the under-65 population. The top 5 percent of elderly spenders accounted for 34 percent of all expenses by the elderly in 2002, while the top 5 percent of non-elderly spenders accounted for 49 percent of expenses by the non-elderly.
But what all that adds up to is that grandparents dying of complications of old age are causing only a small proportion of total health care costs. The article whines about how selfish grandma is for expensively remaining alive, but reveals that grandma is not in fact costing enough to make a noticeable difference. If in each year you kill off the most expensive five percent of over sixty fives, you save twelve percent. (more…)
