> the next time you have trouble booking a surgeon or even a gastroenterologist, you can remember that America’s supply of surgeons and gastroenterologists is being disproportionately used by the AARP crowd.
What a horrible sentiment.
What a horrible sentiment.
I don't think the author really meant that to come across as callous as it sounded. Probably just poor choice of words. I'm only addressing it because someone else reading it here might interpret it in more of an "older people stealing from younger ones again" kind of way for demographic or ideological reasons.
ETA: it already happened as I was writing this.
I'm a younger (34) person with substantial healthcare needs (I have MS). Everything is always oriented towards the old, and I also pay taxes that are used to support them while getting nothing in return despite having similar needs.
Do you really get nothing? And who is paying for whose care? You mention taxes, but they've probably been paying taxes even longer. And why do you think health care is a strict quid pro quo anyway? Some of us believe care should be allocated where it's needed, not where it's paid for. Put another way: why is it a problem that they are getting care? Isn't it that you aren't? This doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. If you feel that you're in competition with someone else for care, the problem is pretty clearly that there aren't enough providing it.
Saying others have less right to health care is pretty terrible no matter which way the finger points.
That said, we do care for the elderly because of their vulnerability but we then shit on younger disabled people. Old people can have assets, most younger disabled people can't, and younger disabled people can lose their benefits by getting married. SSA also applies different criteria for disability and makes it functionally impossible to get if you're young enough versus in your 50s or 60s.
I'm frustrated at being expected to extend infinite grace to the elderly when receiving very little/none, despite us being similarly vulnerable. I also dislike that in general our culture takes care of the elderly/gives them their dues without asking them to take up the corresponding responsibility. As a group, they care very little about the future.
After years fighting/voting for better healthcare, very little has been accomplished. So am I just supposed to suffer and accept I matter less than an old person? That's kind of against basic animal survival instinct. My country seems determined to view it as a quid pro quo, including the elderly.
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs is the only solution for healthcare.
Right now the answer seems to be 'take as much from the young as you can and guarantee them nothing' and that's not sustainable. It's just that most of the young can avoid looking at this reality until they have a health problem.
Absolutely not. The situation is deplorable, and I hope we can get to a better one some day. Fight for all you're worth. All I'm saying is that others who receive care are not your enemies. (Or at least not because they receive care. There's bound to be some overlap.) The enemy is the people within the system who restrict the labor supply, drive up prices for everything else, make arbitrary rules like those you've mentioned, and so on. The politicians and profiteers, not the patients, define that system.
I will never have access to my enemy until there's a critical mass of upset people, and the elderly seem willing to let younger people die of treatable problems as long as they're not effected, so the only way to get them to care and join us seems to be to make them feel as insecure as the rest of us, which sucks.
I believe the elderly have agency and for the ones who are still alive (since of course the people who live to 85+ to begin with are those who didn't have to ruin their health due to poverty and blue collar labor), they've used their agency to say 'we don't care about you'. Which is fine, but then they turn around and get all mad when they're not cared about in return. Either they want to be a part of a community, including accepting the responsibilities, or they don't. They need to stop wanting to have their cake and eat it too.
The number of tests people want to run on someone we all hope dies tomorrow is insane.
Note: my mother, not my grandmother, and I have lived that ordeal for several years. Some interaction is still possible, but recognition has been beyond her for a while. As long as she seems to take some pleasure in her surroundings, no matter how dim or muted the signs, you won't catch me framing my thoughts about her in terms of dollars I could save.
The human experience varies wildly and I would not make such assumptions. Caring for somebody without the hope of improvement for years can make you bitter or even resent the person that no longer resembles the one you loved.
And that's OK? I happen to think it's not, that bitterness and resentment hurt everyone involved, and I know that it's possible to resist those feelings. How, exactly, does the person who succumbs get to play Good Guy?
Prolonging that existence is not a kindness in any sense, and I hope you don’t have to go through such an ordeal.
So it’s a lose-lose: the patient suffers and society has to pay for their privilege to suffer (without recourse, most likely).
And maybe you disagree fundamentally with things like assisted suicide. But someone who posts something like what you replied to most likely do not.
> Not about saving money
Then why even bring it up, let alone cite it as something that change[ds] one's views?
> maybe you disagree fundamentally with things like assisted suicide
In fact I do not. There was a time when my mother wanted to end it, and I wasn't the one who stopped her. I respected her right to make her own choice. Her condition subsequently improved to the point where she no longer wished that, leading to the current status quo, but that's already far more than any of the pissants in this thread deserved to hear about it. Expressing one's own wish for a supposedly-loved one to die is indefensible, even if they also wish it for themselves.
Alzheimer’s and dementia are incredibly cruel experiences for everyone involved. There’s no reason to prolong the situation.
Is it indefinitely sustainable? Not sure. I don’t know if it’s as easy as just extrapolating from recent trends because there may be countless unknowns from biomedical advances to climate destabilized societies to being turned into biological batteries for our machine overlords in the next few centuries.
[1] https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hpb20220506.432025/
[2] https://vbidcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/jama_shran...
>In FY 2022, the Department of Defense (DOD) had $1.64 Trillion distributed among its 6 sub-components.
Where are you getting this 767B number?
[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
I wonder if that means they're subtracting portions of the DoD budget that aren't technically military operations.