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...