Of course YOU are worth it, Prim!But you've called attention, very accurately, to two aspects of this problem which make it difficult (if not impossible) to solve politically.
1. You're young and otherwise healthy and have been paying insurance premiums for 20+ years. You expect to continue working and paying premiums for another 20. When you obtained your health insurance, the insurer had statistics on the disease rates and recovery rates for your age, profession, etc. and used that to calculate your premiums.
You have actually paid for all of your share of all treatments received among a group of people bearing risk similar to yours. No one in that group is going to say, "I don't want to pay for Prim's cancer treatment; let me get cancer instead so that she can pay for mine." You are all equal beneficiaries of either good health or medical treatment.
Assuming the company is not defrauding its customers, and assuming their statistics are accurate, that system of risk sharing is as fair as we can make it.
This is not the case with Medicare. It's a perfect example of what insurers call adverse selection. Everyone in the group receiving this insurance is high risk. They will all need extensive medical treatment eventually. The premium, meanwhile, is being paid by a different group whose risk is much lower. They are being billed not because they entered into a voluntary agreement with those who share similar risk but because they have incomes and the government has the power to take those incomes away from them.
It's been observed that it would actually be cheaper for taxpayers to provide medical care for everyone than it is to provide care only for the elderly. Everyone would pay premiums, everyone would receive benefits in exchange for their costs, and the risk would be spread more evenly.
2. You can never judge the social value of a program based on its value to one individual. There is no way that I personally should be the one to decide whether my own mother or father or child is 'worth' the amount of money society is willing to spend on them. The answer will always be yes.
When my Mom became mentally disabled fifteen years ago, and my Dad became terminally ill within two years of that, as an economist I could see the writing on the wall already then. But no matter how imprudent I knew it to be for society as a whole, I could not deny medical treatment to either of them (I had/have medical POA for both). I never signed a DNR for my Dad - no one even asked me to do so. I did sign fourteen resusitation orders for treatments that are as routine as nose drops in hospitals today. If I had requested a DNR I would have gotten fish eyes for sure. I just signed a DNR for my Mom two months ago under physician's advise because her mental state is such now, after fifteen years of deteriorating brain matter, that returning her from a terminal event to the mental state she is in now would be cruel rather than merciful. But unless she has a heart attack or a massive stroke that kills her, the disease she has now will run its course for another 2-5 years before she dies from it, at a cost of about half a million dollars.
Putting the cost on the taxpayer and the decision on the next of kin is by definition a recipe for disaster.
Most of you guys on the board here are just a bit too young to have entered this phase of experience yet. If your parents live to their eighties, that's when elderly care starts to become an all-consuming project for the children and an ungodly expense for the taxpayer. And, as I said earlier, over-80 is the fastest-growing age group in the U.S. today.
But those of you whose parents were born between 1946 and 1956 will be forced to get rid of them long before they reach 80. You'll still be paying for the care your grandparents received and won't be able to afford any care for your parents.
Jn
. They take good care of me, so I'd like to return the favor. I know that SS isn't going to take care of my parents. I also know that they have some savings, and that they have made plans for the future. But, the best-laid plans gang oft awry, so of course it is possible that they will need to rely on their kids to take care of them someday.
