I can, and it's a big difference.
Agreed. Someone else posted that 1/3 of all Medicare spending is in the last 6 months of life. Ending a life with an injection is murder. Expending vast amounts of money on patients with multiple serious medical problems when it means the patient dies in one month instead of one week is a senseless and cruel.
Yes I can see a difference.
With respect to #2 I do not have a clear picture as to how decisions will be made. Essentially everyone over age 65 in the US is covered by Medicare which is heavily subsidized. From that perspective most health care for the elderly is funded by “everyone else” as the medicare insurance payments made by current recipients was not “saved’ by the government to pay for their needs but was spent at the time it was collected.
Six years ago my mother had a massive heart attack and was rushed to the hospital. Dead on arrival in the emergency room her heart was restarted she spent that night and several days in cardiac intensive care, monitored around the clock. Once she was recovered sufficiently she had an operation and a pacemaker implant. She had several setbacks along the way spending 53 days in the hospital before she was released. She had a number of setbacks along the way and could have expired a number of times during that 53 days had her level of care been reduced or if some of the medical procedures been denied due for cost reasons. In the end she pulled through and is still, at age 78, living a very full life.
The taxpayers spent several hundred thousand dollars on her treatment and she continues to receive tens of thousands of dollars of treatment per year. My mother and father both worked and payed taxes for decades before retiring. Are they owed anything by current generations of taxpayers? If they were productive citizens and paid into the system under the rules at the time are they not entitled to the services they were promised when they paid those Medicare taxes. If they are entitled to only limited services, to what level of services are they entitled and who gets to decide? If someone decides they are entitled to only limited services, should that be communicated to them and should they be able to supplement those services from their own savings if they so choose?
Unless we are willing to end Medicare (I do not see the political support existing in this country to do so), the taxpayers will be funding some level of medical care for the elderly. If we are to limit that care, it will be a political decision. Will that decision be handled on a case by case basis by physicians or a bureaucrat, or will there be government mandated guidelines (i.e. a person over age 70 is allowed only 10 days on a respirator even if the doctor believes 15 days will allow the patient to survive; or people over age 70 are not entitled to heart transplants and over age 80 are not entitled to bypass operations)? If there are government guidelines, can the family or the individual choose to pay for extra care above the guidelines? Will the government allow people to purchase supplemental insurance?
I fear a situation where the government allows only limited care for the elderly masses and will not allow the elderly masses to pay for additional care services or buy private insurance to pay for additional services beyond those allowed by the government. If this is the case, I see no difference between #2 and #1, particularly if there is a different care system for the governing elites.
Stephen Hawking is one of the longest surviving ALS patients in the world. His life has no doubt been sustained at considerable expense to the UK taxpayers through measures that are unlikely to be provided to the average citizen. Ted Kennedy went to extraordinary measures to battle his brain cancer. His care was paid for by the taxpayers as he was a member of Congress. Should the government decide some should receive exotic expensive treatment paid for by the taxpayers while others do not? If so, the government is essentially practicing euthenasia on some.