I have the same Medicare setup. One of the pluses is that we have much better access to medical care here than they have in other countries. I cannot complain about wait times or any of that.
The real problem with medical care is that there is so much that can be done now. Take leukemia. Back in the 60’s if you were diagnosed with that, it was all over. Go home and get your affairs in order and they’ll give you morphine if anything hurts. Today, it is treatable, but with long, drawn out, complicated, and expensive procedures.
Not too long ago, a woman on dialysis got an engineered pig kidney made especially for her. It actually lasted for 2 months before they started tinkering with her medication and then it quit working. That is very promising, very impressive, and undoubtedly very expensive. What is going to happen if this treatment comes online? Every kidney patient is going to want a bespoke pig kidney, and they are going to want it now. Who is going to pay for this? And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
I suppose we could set a cap on how much of the economy can be devoted to medical care, but I don’t know how that would be administered.
There is a lot of soul searching that going to need to be done.
Not everything we can do is something we should do but who decides?
We are not the only country that can treat lukemia or or other such things now we are only the most expensive place on the planet to get such care. That is the problem. We seem to have too many hogs at the trough and too much greed. The system is free to charge what the traffic will bear and does.