Hip replacement is expensive and there’s little amibiguity, when your wife needed it there was and is no alternative. However one has to be careful of what one wishes for. The drugs mentioned are going to get incredibly cheap and government is going to want to give them to everyone for everything. The dirty secret of government health care especially medicare is that the government will choose to put everyone on drugs. Already it is truly awful at a (primarily medicare-funded) nursing home that I am familiar with. They give out generic Oxycodone like candy. Worse than candy, they force it on patients to get them under “control”. It won’t surprise me if pain killers eventually become a replacement for hip replacement.
My wife and I cared for my mother-in-law in our home for 2+ years. She could not walk for the last 3 years of her life, had congestive heart failure and had 4 strokes. She was in a nursing home for the last 2 months of her life. We lost her in March. I know about the wrenching judgment call concerning medication and patient well being. Unfortunately, your statement is very valid in most nursing homes. And unless we can overturn ObozoCare it will get infinitely worse.
—Hip replacement is expensive and there’s little amibiguity, when your wife needed it there was and is no alternative.—
Actually there is one. It is the one people chose when there was no such thing as hip replacement.