Rising Health Care Costs
Scientists and pharmaceutical companies keep inventing ever more expensive health care treatments. We need some measures to push prices back down. Here are some ideas:
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)
- About half your lifetime healthcare expenditures occur in the last year of life. When a person is believed to be in the last year of life, we should stop treatments designed to extend life, and focus on making the patient comfortable.
- We should allow people to have access to physician-assisted suicide, even if they are not at death’s door.
- If a fetus is badly deformed, abort it. Even if it survived it would have a horrible life with painful and expensive medical treatments.
- No publicly-funded fertility treatments. There are too many people on earth already. Let them adopt or become foster parents. Perhaps godparents could have an extended rôle in caring for children.
- People who need health care because of their own stupidity, e.g. skiing out of bounds, gross obesity, climbing in tiger cages, taking recreational drugs… should be treated as a second priority, only after everyone else.
- It should be illegal to put antibiotics in animal feed. This causes the germs to develop immunity to the antibiotics, rendering them useless.
- More use should be made of home care, with a nurse checking in periodically, mostly by phone. This would help contain hospital-contracted diseases.
- There should be a user fee for expensive procedures like CAT (Computerised Axial Tomography) scans to put some pressure against using them frivolously.