Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), the oldest and longest serving member of the Senate, remains hospitalized with a staph infection nearly three weeks after being admitted to the hospital.Sentator Byrd is 91. He is clearly past his sell-by date. According to Obama, maybe the elderly shouldn't be receiving the same care as the younger members of society. Three weeks in the hospital is no joke. I'll bet that cost tens of thousands of dollars, if not well into the hundreds of thousands. All of that cash was spent while 83 bazillion Americans go without health care*.
So in all seriousness, if we're going to triage people based on future life expectancy and allocate scarce medical care resources following this triage, should Senator Byrd have been hospitalized?
* - Hey, if the Health Care fanatics can make up numbers, so can I.
Well, it kind of depends, doesn't it? If he is paying for the medical care out of his own pocket, then sure, he should get all the medical care he is willing to pay for.
ReplyDeleteIf his insurance company is paying for his medical care, then it is between him and them. I'm pretty sure that insurance policies have a hard upper limit, though - once you pass some fairly high value (something on the order of a million dollars or so, I think), don't they generally cut you off?
If *I* (and other taxpayers) are expected to foot the bill for him, then, well, there are going to have to be limits. If, say, it were possible to keep him alive as a head in a jar, but it would cost a billion dollars a year to do it, then the answer would have to be "hell, no!" [1]
My personal feeling is that everything would be much clearer if instead of lumping everything together into one "health package", we got in the habit of thinking of things in parts:
The first part would be health activities that "promote the general welfare", like vaccines, other public-health measures, and annual physical checkups for children. It would make sense for these to be covered through the government, because they are things that ultimately benefit all of us (for example, getting the neighbor kids vaccinated as well as my own makes *everybody* much less likely to get the disease).
The second part would be routine predictable medical care for adults, like dental visits and annual checkups. These would best be routinely paid for out-of-pocket, because the whole idea of "insurance" for an expense that *you know you are going to incur this year* is, quite frankly, crazy. It amounts to letting an insurance company hold your money for a while, give part of it back, and keep the rest for no really good reason.
The third part would be for things that are unpredictable and do not happen to everbody, like accidents or sudden illness. This is the only part that should be covered by "insurance"
That leaves us with the fourth part, people that have conditions that make "routine, predictable" expenses very high - like $5000/month drugs that they need to take every day for the rest of their life. This is the only category of health care that I see as at all problematic. And even here, a straightforward solution exists (each person pays for it out-of-pocket as far as possible, and those who think this is too heartless form health cooperatives and charities to cover the costs of whoever they think deserves it).
I think most of the problems with health care are directly from an unwillingness to break up health care into categories like that. This is coupled with the weird idea people have that "insurance" should cover all health costs, instead of just the one part of health costs that insurance actually makes sense for. And from the idea that if the government covers *any* health costs, that it somehow magically becomes responsible for covering *all* of them.
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[1] That is, unless it was part of a research project, launching him as a component of a living space probe to Alpha Centauri. That would be pretty cool.
Tim,
ReplyDeleteI never thought of the routine visits that way. You are absolutely right. It's a measure of how desnsitized we've become to the act of paying for insurance that it never dawned on me, Mr. Fiscal Tightwad, that we ought to pay for our own routine visits.
As for the pills for chronic conditions, I'd lump that into insurance as well. Genetics is a crapshoot and much of the time those pills go for folks at the shallow end of the gene pool in terms of physical constitution. That could have been me and, in fact, was me when I was young.
It doesn't bother me to pay into an insurance pool to cover that for someone else, so long as I know they're paying into it, too.
As heartless as it sounds, I'm not big on giving people a free ride in medical care. If you want to behave in such a way that you can't get a job at a place that offers medical insurance (wear tattoos all over your body, pierce your face with a sewing machine, smoke dope so you can't pass medical tests) I don't want to pay for your doctor visits.
If you're such a rebel, you can pay for your own.
Senator Byrd, former Exalted Cyclops of his local KKK chapter and US Senator... what a guy.
ReplyDeleteWest Virginians, and expatriate WV natives like myself, adore the doddering old buffoon. When he dies, he'll probably be put in one of those Lucite cubes and situated prominently on the portico of the state capitol building.
Despite the fact that he's been on the wrong side of nearly every issue since entering the Senate in - believe it or not - 1959, he has singlehandedly been responsible for funneling billions of dollars to WV. It's difficult to navigate the state highways because virtually all the roads that are paved are named after him: to wit, "Drive down to Byrd Expressway and make your first right on Byrd Road. You'll come up on Byrd Bypass in about five miles - look for the Byrd Building on your left - and turn right on the bypass."
He was also responsible, when he was Majority Leader, for siting the FBI labs in Clarksburg WV, a sleepy hamlet formerly famous for being a sleepy hamlet. Now there is a nice new superhighway that goes straight to DC and the Clarksburg area has become West Virginia's "Technology Corridor". In addition to the FBI center, the vaunted Technology Corridor hosts other high-tech firms like Wal-Mart, Big Lots, Food Lion, and McDonald's, as well as several start-up ventures selling used cars, guns, ATVs, and tree stands.
So don't be too hard on Senator Byrd. If he and his fellow toga-draggers in the World's Greatest Deliberative Body have given themselves a 24K, diamond-studded, taxpayer-funded, extended bodywork warranty to cover every possible malady, infection, ache, and pain, well, it's just because they deserve it.
And you don't.