My comment #10 should have read:
“Your so-called advice is worthless to those who need medical care or who are NOT wealthy enough to pay cash for everything.”
I had quadruple bypass open heart surgery with a valve repair two years ago. The costs were over $500,000. The VA and Medicare paid for it. These catastrophic events are what medical coverage is for. I, unlike you apparently, did not have a spare half a million dollars in spare change laying around the house to pay for it out-of-pocket. Thank heavens for my VA and insurance coverage or I would have been bankrupt.
But, I don't want to debate all that. I just want to point out that we implicitly endorse the system by participating in it. People who participate should quit complaining about it. Those who really want to change the system should quit participating. If there are people who want to participate and complain, well, they should probably see a doctor for help with that conflict.
Yes, fifty years ago, you would be dead right now. On the other hand, the best heart medical treatment available fifty years ago would have cost nowhere near $500,000, probably on the order of maybe $30,000 in 1964 dollars, $200,000 in today’s dollars. Since then medicine has become an industry, where everyone involved expects to make a lot of money , even if if that is not their only or even prime motive for going into the field. Federal money has become an expected and major supplier of funding, and insurance companies have gotten very fat on it as well. Something of the same dynamic has happened in higher education. College presidents used to be scholars; now they are fund raisers.