Free Republic

Don’t be silly. Everyone knows that only Americans are racist.

“Polar Bears love it!”

I know. I was speaking in, shall we say, fantastical terms. Of course it would never happen. But I wish it would.

Easy answer: if you are not paying taxes of some kind (income, FICA or taxes on investments), you don’t vote. Or you don’t vote if you are a net “taker” versus a net producer. Or if you are receiving a check from the government of any kind, except for a system like social security to which you have contributed, you don’t vote.

Evidently, the drug company ponied up free medication for this woman. But I have a question. She is a great-grandmother. To me, that means she has an extensive family. Why are they not helping out with the costs? Part of being a proponent of subsidiarity (which I assume most Freepers are—it just means having the smallest human unit possible responsible for processes and activities) is having people rely on their families first, before they turn to their neighbors and then to total strangers.

I suspect that the woman’s family, along with a church community, could have handled a large part of the expense of this treatment. But they are never confronted with that question, because we have indeed “socialized” our minds to expect the government/large corporations to take care of us.

OTOH, we do need to have conversations about the marginal costs of care. $16,000 for a projected best-case scenario of six extra months of life. Would we spend $160,000?

At what point is a payer of any kind (government or insurance company) justified in denying payment for unproven treatment or very small increments of benefit? Just askin...

And here’s an ironic twist: smokers are cheaper in the long run. They die earlier and faster, saving all the money that would otherwise be spent treating years of dementia and other chronic disease.

Doesn’t matter..give Obamacare a few years, and there will be no $4K/month drugs. Government-controlled medicine drives innovation from the market. There will be no incentive to take the financial/legal risks to develop treatments for conditions that are relatively rare, such as MS, specific forms of cancer, Huntington’s, etc., because government price controls will not allow the market to work.

The way the process works now, companies are incentivized to develop treatments for specific cancers, even though the incidence of the cancers is relatively low. They know that once they get an indication for end-stage cancer of a certain kind, physicians will expand the use of the medication to earlier stages of that particular form of cancer and also to other types of cancer. Thus, the actual market turns out to be bigger (and more profitable) than the apparent market. (Even this sort of innovation is being disincentivized by a government that threatens drugmakers with fraud charges when doctors utilize drugs for “off-label” treatment and also refuses to pay for off-label usage.)

Of course, the focus on medication costs requires us to ignore the fact that appropriate drug treatment actually tremendously reduces the overall cost of medical care. Obviously not in the case of end-stage cancer treatment, but in the treatment of chronic disease, by reducing hospitalization costs, trips to the ER, more costly treatment later, etc.

It’s market forces at work, DonaldC. Drug with limited use (can’t use it for headaches!) still costs almost $1B to develop. Patent life is limited (and much of it is eaten up by the development phase; actual time-on-market patent life is probably very short).

You want the best stuff? You gotta pay for the risks involved in coming up with it. You want cheaper stuff? Live with less efficacy and fewer choices.

Or we could do what Europe does, which is extend the patent life of drugs, so that companies can lower the prices as they have longer to recoup. But oops, Obama and the Congress already ruled that possibility out.

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Socialism is a big lie.

I think government workers should be able to retire after 30 years with a full pension—which they cannot begin to collect until they reach normal retirement age of 65.

Wow. Set her leg, and while you’re at it, sterilize her. Too dumb to reproduce is the phrase that comes to mind.

From the paper:
“Additionally, the complete lives system
assumes that, although life-years are equally valuable to all, justice requires the fair distribution of them.”

Whenever politicians start talking about “justice,” you know we are in trouble.

LOL! Why not give them a full clip, though? And don’t limit it to CongressCritters. It would solve that pesky public official problem we have, too.

I am sure that anyone who falls into the category of “chronic user” is in his gun sights. I haven’t read the paper in the Lancet—I assume he published it there (2nd tier journal) because it got a cold reception with journals here in the States. Of course it would go over well in Britain—they already deny their seniors care based on their analysis of Quality-Life-Years or whatever they call them.

To be sure, end of life care and the costs associated with it is an ethical issue we need to address. What we don’t need, though, is for the government to address it for us. And end of life care is a different question than allocating resources to seniors for routine care...we do not want to be in the position of having the government deciding at what point a life loses value.

From what I read, the bulk of our healthcare $ are spent on a minority of the populace with chronic disease (80/20). That 20% is probably mostly of an older age, but not necessarily. Do we want the government denying care to a 40-year-old with chronic disease because they have used up “their share?”

The government needs to free up the market for something that is truly “insurance;” people need to pony up for their routine maintenance care; and conversations about end-of-life care and extraordinary measures need to take place privately, among family members, not with the government bean-counters.

Think it is brother...

Pharmboy, eh. Am I your mother?

Link to the CEI press release: http://cei.org/news-release/2009/07/23/obama-adviser-urges-controversial-%E2%80%9Csenior-death-discount%E2%80%9D-health-care-reform

Yes, I suspect if tox tests were done, they’d find very strong tranquilizers. Rohypnol?

At any rate, if Canada’s nanny-state cared, they’d make it mandatory for Muslim women to wear life jackets under their hajibs! Or drain all their swimming pools.

Yes, I bet the man is really “mourning.” Ha. Drowning is actually right up there in the honor killing protocol. And how handy—far less forensic evidence to go on and not as obviously a murder. I’m just waiting for the diversity geniuses to explain how this is just a cultural difference.

I can hear it now. “Just go ahead and die already, you selfish jerk!”

Except for the special exemptions enjoyed by privileged people like Ted Kennedy...