It is all terrible for everyone. Modern Medicine... what has it done to us? We once died peacefully at home or in the hospital after a short but terminal illness. Now, with the aid of the “best care money can buy” we struggle out losing our mobility, freedom, faculties and often our dignity in the process.
On average, we live no longer than most of the rest of the modern world but we spend a whole lot more money doing it.
In my family we go through the same things the other FReepers here describe. Can’t find help, costs a fortune, we can’t drop our work and go take care of ________ ourselves, constant worry and strain from one crisis to the other, good days and bad days but increasing numbers of bad days and on and on. I think we are lucky. We found a competent and apparently caring place near my sis for Mom to go to. It isn’t home but it is the best we could do. It sure isn’t what Dad wanted or what I promised him but I didn’t know the price of the promise when I made it. It tears me up for failing him.
I hope I am somehow blessed as an old family friend was. He went out to feed and check on his cows. Took his cow dog with him. They didn’t come home at the usual time. Went out to the farm and found him leaning up against the wheel on his truck with his dog beside him. He was dead. Apparently got out of the truck, fed, felt bad, sat on the ground leaning up against the truck and died. I want to die in the field with my boots on but don’t bury me in Texas! Please take me back to Oklahoma.
Your first paragraph nails it.
On a whole I see the government-sponored medical-industrial complex as a sector of the economy that preys upon basic human anxieties over sickness, pain, injury and death.
I hope to not ever see another doctor in my life.