Christmas is the time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell government what they want and their kids pay for it.
Medical need is an infinitely expandable concept. There is always one more marginal procedure that can be done. There is no end to the medical and surgical treatments that a technologically sophisticated and advanced society can give to aging bodies.
I believe for some high-technology medicine, like transplants and kidney dialysis, age should be a consideration in the delivery of that technology. In a world of limited resources, we have a larger duty to a 10-year-old than to a 90-year-old.
Universal coverage, not medical technology, is the foundation of any caring health care system.
Modern medicine has presented us with a Faustian bargain: Our aging bodies can bankrupt our children and grandchildren. We have run into the 'law of diminishing returns' in health care, where we are often doing more and more, with higher and higher technology, at more and more cost, for less and less benefit.
A truly moral health care system should start out by covering all of its citizens with basic health care. It would not be seduced by its technology and fancy buildings.
Our globe is under new dramatic environmental pressure: our globe is warming, our ice caps melting, our glaciers receding, our coral is dying, our soils are eroding, our water tables falling, our fisheries are being depleted, our remaining rainforests shrinking. Something is very, very wrong with our eco-system.
We need to start training more primary health providers and fewer specialists. We will never be able to control health care costs unless we challenge the over-emphasis on medical research, specialists and technology and put more emphasis on delivering good, everyday basic medicine to those who now have none.
I think we're rapidly approaching the day where medical science can keep people alive in hospitals, hooked up to tubes and things, far beyond when any kind of quality of life is left at all.
Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want - and their kids pay for it.