THROW GRANNY FROM THE TRAIN: TALKING UP HEALTHCARE RATIONING
Unsilent Generation - Two pieces on the front page of the Washington Post's Sunday "Outlook" section go a long way toward illustrating what's wrong with the terms of current debates around health care costs and health care for the elderly. The juxtaposition of these two commentaries, which appeared side-by-side under a photo of a sunset and the heading "The Dying of the Light," sends an insidious message about the need for "rationing" treatment to the very old and very sick: To keep health care costs from bankrupting our society, it suggests, we may have no choice but to pull the plug on the geezers.
The Post feature is only the latest of a growing volume of commentary on so-called age-based health care rationing. Even beyond any core ethical questions, the problem with these discussions is what they too often fail to mention: the role of private profits in creating, or at least seriously exacerbating, the supposedly intractable problem of health care costs. Like everything else in the public debate over health care policy, the "dying of the light" has become subject to the lying of the right, where corporate interests trump even questions of life and death. . .
We are on a collision course between our wish to live longer, healthier lives and our capacity to pay for that wish. Whether we can somehow avoid the collision is perhaps the most important domestic issue of this century. From now on, health care costs will be up there with globalization, terrorism and climate change as a force shaping our world. . .
In blog for the American Prospect, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research lays out why the underlying terms of this debate are fatally flawed. Criticizing David Brown's Post piece for "telling readers that there is nothing we can do about health care costs," Baker writes:
"Remarkably, this lengthy column never once notes the fact that the United States pays more than twice as much per person for health care than the average of the other wealthy countries, all of whom enjoy longer life expectancies."
The Post feature is only the latest of a growing volume of commentary on so-called age-based health care rationing. Even beyond any core ethical questions, the problem with these discussions is what they too often fail to mention: the role of private profits in creating, or at least seriously exacerbating, the supposedly intractable problem of health care costs. Like everything else in the public debate over health care policy, the "dying of the light" has become subject to the lying of the right, where corporate interests trump even questions of life and death. . .
We are on a collision course between our wish to live longer, healthier lives and our capacity to pay for that wish. Whether we can somehow avoid the collision is perhaps the most important domestic issue of this century. From now on, health care costs will be up there with globalization, terrorism and climate change as a force shaping our world. . .
In blog for the American Prospect, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research lays out why the underlying terms of this debate are fatally flawed. Criticizing David Brown's Post piece for "telling readers that there is nothing we can do about health care costs," Baker writes:
"Remarkably, this lengthy column never once notes the fact that the United States pays more than twice as much per person for health care than the average of the other wealthy countries, all of whom enjoy longer life expectancies."
posted by TPR | 5:02 PM
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