Posted on 10/19/2013 10:37:13 AM PDT by Java4Jay
One percent consumed 21 percent of the nearly $1.3 trillion Americans spent on health care. Five percent of patients accounted for 50 percent of all health-care expenditures. By contrast, the bottom 50 percent of patients accounted for just 2.8 percent of spending.
(Excerpt) Read more at minnpost.com ...
You only take on such statistical assessments if you have DEATH PANELS on your agenda.
This is coming from the elitist, population control, duty to die, crowd.
This is news?
I’m not sure what you’re getting at. You’re free to choose no medical care if that’s what you mean.
Most of us have witnessed our loved ones suffering before passing, because the very process of dying, more often than not, includes suffering.
Do as you need to do. But I won’t stand quietly by while a government employee makes medical decisions for me or my loved ones.
Doctors are not available. They won’t take the crap insurance because they cannot collect their co-pays or deductibles.
Consider your business model if you could only collect 60% of your billed fees—and at the same time the complicated insurance nightmare means that anything less than 100% compliance with their changing standards means you get less. And it takes longer to get paid.
You can mandate crappy insurance all you want. But if it’s crappy insurance, no doctor will take it.
It is also those who never communicate their desire to have a DNR. Too many kids are afraid to let their parents die. Having some EMT smash an old person’s ribs when there is no chance for a meaningful recovery...and having the patient lingers in the hospital, in pain, and with no dignity for a week because their absentee kids cannot make a decision.
Much of this crap can be avoided with a single, sane conversation long before it’s necessary.
Over the past two years my wife and I have walked four elderly relatives through this process. We’ve seen lots of folks in the nursing home and hospitals just wasting away on all sorts of medication that the patient would not have wanted and Doctors don’t want to prescribe.
It seems crazy, but now we have to educate the stupid baby boomers on how to die.
Bookmark
Boy, you said it!
For those unfamiliar with the world of medicine Vanderbilt Medical Center is one of the finest,most important,hospitals in the world.
You can say that again ...
Yep, that's what they're there for.
They aren’t. My husband is a health insurance company executive. I’ve asked him. Neither are gay people or HIV positive people.
Big pharma crashes and burns in the next decade or so, when those now in their 80 and 90s are all dead.
Future generation, for the most part, will no way be able to afford or be provided these extremely expensive drugs/medications.
Big pharma nose dives in the future...
...hallways behind the emergency rooms that lead back to the free clinic because they are too damned fat to fit through. :)
You misunderstand. I’m in NO way against the spending of Medicare dollars for necessary procedures/medications for ANY patient, regardless of their age; be they 1 hour or 101 years old.
What I DO have a problem with is the elderly, in poor health, with terminal conditions, spending MY tax dollars to buy another week or month - usually miserably - and ultimately fruitlessly. I see it ALL the time.
If you are paying out of pocket for your care... knock yourself out. If you are expecting the taxpayers to pick up the tab there MUST be some reasonable limits.
I know people like that. Their health [or lack of] becomes their purpose in life, their hobby, their pastime.
My neighbor across the street, whom I've known all my life -- two years younger than I -- is morbidly obese, has had three knee replacements and is contemplating another. She's on Disability [natch] and life is just one, long trip to the doctor interspersed with bouts of therapy.
An excellent read, if you're interested, is Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. Observing from the position of a prisoner of the Nazis, he realized how desperate humans are to give a purpose to their lives and can find it in the most perverse of situations. It's a very, very good book.
Our welfare system has replaced the need to find work to survive with the need to negotiate the bureaucracy to exist. For many, I fear, that search for the next check has become their meaning.
Agreed. The resources wasted are tremendous.
I used to be an ER nurse in the Atlanta area - now I’m a home hospice nurse. I have seen what you report and I have seen how (primarily) the families of the elderly abuse the Medicare system: save Mama at any cost - but don’t send ME the bill - and Doctors are too chicken-shit to tell them that a) it’s not going to do any long term good and b) you are just adding to their suffering.
What REALLY frosts me is the nursing home patients; many of them so sick and demented they can’t even tell you their names, getting hauled to/from dialysis 3x/wk by ambulance at TREMENDOUS cost!
Why can’t dialysis be performed at the facility they already reside in?
He said 95 YO because it’s a little less controversial but he meant 75 or 65 year olds.
The critical point I make is this. You have NO way of knowing just how much longer that 80yr old will live if they have a particular procedure.
None.
Deny it and they will most assuredly die very soon.
With the procedure they may live another 15 years.
Who makes these decisions and who is to know?
It isn’t ‘fruitless’ until it, unfortunately, is.
Most people would have written my EIGHTY YEAR OLD grandfather with kidney failure off. he was EIGHTY. Good grief, how much longer does he have anyways? Ultimately he had a dozen years.
Eventually his kidneys failed again. He refused dialysis this time. Dialysis isn’t for the faint of heart. At 90+ he just didn’t have it in him and requested hospice instead. He passed by a picture of my grandmother the day he found out and said ‘I’m coming to see you real soon!’. Nobody questioned his decision. Especially his doctors.
Locally, a heart clinic is ALREADY telling their patients over 70 that there’s nothing that can be done for them. Regardless of the medical problem.
And, like I said in a followup, MOST of the patients in his dialysis were middle aged and grossly obese.
No matter your criteria, sooner or later actually spending money on anyone’s medical condition will be ‘too much to pay’.
For the record I don’t believe in any insurance. Even private. Private socialization of risk (ie, private insurance) ALWAYS, ALWAYS leads to public socialization of risk (the NHS, Canadian single payer, etc). Because, all together now...’it’s not FAAAAAAIRRRRR’.
The problem is health care will be rationed. Always has been and always will be. The question is who decides.
If it is your money and your life? Someone else’s money and your life. Someone else’s life and your money? Someone else’s life and their money?
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