<sarcasm> Yeah! Who do those old people think they are, getting all weak and sickly!? </sarcasm>
Most of the western world believes that society should be taxed to provide health care for everyone. Like education, welfare, and social security, it's something we all pay for to live in a moral, civilized society. Thank God Ayn Rand doesn't run the universe and the government forces you and me to pay for Grandpa's medication.
The screwed up part of the system is that the idea used to be that you'd pay into the system with an expectation that you would eventually get the same services as you got older - but have you even looked at the actuarial tables lately? Practically ever western country has massive unfunded liabilities especially as the baby boomers retire.
Personally I like Megan McArdle's solution - let people buy catastrophic loss insurance and fund the rest out of your own pockets. The premiums would be relatively minimal - but the idea that we have to have the government provide insurance / or that even what's proposed in the current legislation solves this problem is frankly nuts. I find it absolutely bizarre that as a Canadian, that while the US government spends more per capita on publicly funded Medicare/Medicaid than Canadians do, coverage for Americans is spotty at best - and you want the US government to get even more involved in healthcare through regulation and direct interventions?
I'm not saying I have an answer, but we need to address the real question previous generations never had to face before, which is how much burden do we want to put onto the younger generation to take care of the older one when there are so much fewer young people? At what point do you say "The cost to keep Grandma alive another 6 months costs too much."?
As for keeping Grandma alive, the closer we come to a government run system, the less you will be in control of what happens to your Grandma and instead subject to increasingly draconian policies of what is and isn't covered given that governments the world over are trying to do more with dwindling resources - something is going to give.