Are you serious? Everyone regardless of age should get medical care. It's as simple as that.
For example, saving a person's left eye is less valuable if they still have their right, because they can still see, versus someone who was already blind in their right eye that would leave them completely blind. So they're willing to spend more to save that person's left eye if they would otherwise be completely blind.
Similarly, saving the life of someone young is of higher utility than someone old, because their life expectancy is longer.
These sorts of calculations bother some people, but it is a practical reality that these decisions have to be made. I actually think NHS works pretty well and it's better to be open and transparent about these sorts of decisions, versus the American system.
But we shouldn't tell old people "you are useless therefore go somewhere and die". It's hard to imagine but most of the young people here will also get old one day. And they won't be wealthy enough to pay health costs out of pocket.
That doesn't mean they won't get any care, but it would mean that the maximum that would be spent to save them would be less than someone who was expected to live much longer because of the care.
Paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to save a ten-year-old from cancer will be accepted because it could add decades to their life. Paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to save a ninety-year-old from cancer will not because it is unlikely to increase their lifespan very much.
No one is saying that or advocating for that. I think you're unfairly assuming malice or ambivalence on the part of commenters who are trying to clarify the practical reality of the situation.
Consider for a moment, regardless of how unrealistic you feel it may be, the utility of funding the care of a 20 year old with cancer versus a 90 year old with cancer. All things being equal, a system with finite resources should prioritize the 20 year old, because the younger person will likely be less expensive to save long term and can generate more productivity for society afterwards. We'll call this our Socratic baseline.
Now obviously in the real world two patients' ailments are never equal. But if you can agree to this baseline, we can proceed to haggle as conditions more closely approximate reality and things stop being so equal.
We should not leave the elderly out to die or abandon them. But we have to be honest and balance that moral imperative with the unfortunate, practical reality that we only have finite resources. That doesn't mean we kill anyone off. It means we make nuanced decisions about how much to invest in their care - and how to do so - given their prognosis. Age is a fundamental measure of prognosis.
I am on board with taking age into account for coat of treatments. But you also need to accept that older people need more care and that that's ok. It's a difficult balance.
You have finite resources. You have requests for resources which exceed your capabilities to service. You need to determine an order.
In an ideal utopian world, no one would ever need these services. In a less ideal world, everyone who needs these services would be serviced quickly and effectively with only positive outcomes.
In the real world, you have to make choices. These are very hard choices, and they have longer term impacts. It is literally "the good of the many vs the good of the few."
The NHS stuff is done by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence based on quality-adjusted life years and they have a guideline of £20,000 per year. So if a cancer treatment lets you live ten more years in ok condition it's worth spending £200k to do it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_for_Health_...
This is debatable. Most of one’s healthcare expenses will be incurred in the final months of life. The population to whom this statistic doesn’t apply is doctors—they know when the marginal benefit of treatment isn’t worth it.
If I had a choice between burning my kids’ estate to sneak out a year in agony or die with dignity, I know which I’d choose. The compassionate response isn’t always the right one.
Health, just like fire fighting, should not be a for-profit business.
End-of-life care is intensive, chronic, risky and generally involves cutting-edge techniques (since yesterday's death sentence is today's extendable life). This is fundamental to the cost of care. As a result, end-of-life costs are similar across the board [1].
If there is a unique American angle to this, it's doctors afraid of being sued spending too much on dying Americans.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/cjarlotta/2016/01/19/end-of-lif...
Fire fighting still cost money. non profit medical still costs money. And yes, there is only so much medical care to go around.
US has a reasonable share of non-profit hospitals and other medical institutions, but the prices are not drastically different.
Random googling suggests that average doctor salary in Los Angeles is in the range $195,335–$254,517. Across the pond average doctor salary in Ireland is quoted at €48,020. For context, a registered nurse in California is making on average $94,120.
European or Asian medical professionals go to medical or nursing school with the goals of joining the middle class. In the US "graduated med school" is synonymous with raking in cash.
Your mistake is to think that nonprofit means that they don't make profit. They still pay a ton of money to their administrators and doctors. And the rest of the profit goes into fancy buildings.
It's a false choice. The U.S. is the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and other, poorer countries provide universal health care. The choice isn't between providing health care to old or to young people, but between providing health care to everyone or (putting more money in some people's pockets? probably not even that when the cost of uninsured, unhealthy people is factored in).
I would really like to have a source for this. Cynical me thinks this makes too much sense to be true...
"In a Stanford study, 88 percent of responding physicians said they would avoid invasive procedures and life-prolonging machines. But a newly released comparative study of Medicare recipients, as well as a longitudinal study and separate analysis of Medicare data published in January, suggest that the actual differences between end-of-life treatments that doctors and nondoctors receive are slight."
The other data point is the story of "La Crosse, Wisconsin," which "spends less on health care for patients at the end of life than any other place in the country, according to the Dartmouth Health Atlas" [2]. The cause? "Some 96 percent of people who die in La Crosse have an advance directive or similar documentation" while "nationally, only about 30 percent of adults have a document like that."
[1] https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/at-the-end-of-life...
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/03/05/286126451/livi...
* Everyone should get medical care when a routine physical costs $100?
* Everyone should get medical care when a routine physical costs $1,000?
* Everyone should get medical care when a routine physical costs $10,000?
The question makes as much sense as asking "Should we have a military if soldiers have a salary of 250 billion dollars each?"
The soldier analogy doesn't quite apply, as it doesn't require complex skills and providers of the service are not in short supply. A potential candidate can surely hold out for a starting salary that's 10x the average, but others eyeing his position will likely be content with the average.
An anesthesiologist, on the other hand, or an MRI lab, might be the only game in town, and if they say the prices are going up by 10% next year, the prices are going up. One is welcome to drive to the next town over, but with taxpayers covering the expense, why bother?
What cost constraints exist in "everyone should get medical care" system to prevent healthcare providers from consuming 100% of GDP?
Meanwhile, https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/sta...
"Health spending is projected to grow 1.0 percentage point faster than Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per year over the 2017-26 period; as a result, the health share of GDP is expected to rise from 17.9 percent in 2016 to 19.7 percent by 2026."
Personally, i am against most organ transplants. The massive cost to save one life there could save thousands if spent on vaccinations overseas. Even at home, people die for lack of basic treatments every day.