Medicare and Medicaid. Our nationalized health care system. Over the past two decades, they have destroyed the budget to unreal proportions. Unfortunately, the worse is yet to come, as baby boomers are becoming of the age where they will need the most critical care of their life spans. It is estimated that a third to a half of ones lifetime health care costs are consumed in the last six months of life.
As Obama seeks to nationalize health care, plus reduce expenses wherever possible, the question becomes.....In an aging population, how do you keep them from blowing up the budget? There is only one answer: rationing.
Accordingly, Britain's National Health Service can deny treatments it deems not cost-effective -- and if you're old and infirm, the cost-effectiveness of treating your illnesses. In Canada, they ration by queuing. You can wait forever for so-called elective procedures like hip replacements.
Rationing is not quite as alien to America as we think. We already ration kidneys and hearts for transplant according to survivability criteria as well as by queuing. A nationalized health-insurance system would ration everything from MRIs to intensive care by myriad similar criteria.
This is the uneasy truth of pure economic survival for any health care program. And as distasteful as this might seem, it makes sense, from a financial standpoint. This is the time where a panel of doctors will completely survey your malady, and actually determine the return they will get on investing health care dollars, quite frankly, on you.
What are the mathematical chances of your survival, and your quality of life should you receive benefit of a procedure. Frankly, the option for many will be to spend precious health care dollars on comforting you the patient, and preparing you for the inevitable. This will especially be true if you have reached the national expected survival expectation.
Think this sounds like a bad movie plot?....don't. The unspoken truth is the insurance companies, and medical community as a whole may (and some say are) already making those unspoken determinations to a certain extent.
With financial resources at a premium, isn't this a near certainty, even if left uncommunicated to the patient in such fiscal terms? Aren't they already?
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