Halperin: I believed in death panels before I didn't

[RogueBeaver]

Slight paraphrase.

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Good thing I didn't order the book yet.  Now I don't plan to.

[Yank2133]

Halperin has always been useless hack.

[Torie]

Sadly, death panels are inevitable. Otherwise, in time, most of our GDP would be spent on healthcare - an absolute impossibility of course. It is one of those hard truths that cannot be escaped, that nobody wants to talk about. Where the rubber really meets the road is when all those folks living longer, live into dementia. I read somewhere that about 50% of males by their late 80's have dementia. I also recall from somewhere that the incidence of dementia in the next 20 years will grow by five fold absent medical progress in technology to slow the process down (that was the one thing Gingrich was right about - figuring out how to slow the process down just has to be job one). Caring for demented is hideously expensive of course. And then there are those miracle drugs for psoriasis that I have mentioned. 3,000,000 folks with it, it doesn't kill you, you can have it for 40 years, and those biological drug shots cost about $800 every two weeks. You do the math.

[opebo]

Sadly, death panels are inevitable. Otherwise, in time, most of our GDP would be spent on healthcare - and absolute impossibility of course. It is one of those hard truths that cannot be escaped, that nobody wants to talk about. Where the rubber really meets the road is when all those folks living longer, live into dementia. I read somewhere that about 50% of males by their late 80's have dementia. I also recall from somewhere that the incidence of dementia in the next 20 years will grow by five fold absent medical progress in technology to slow the process down (that was the one thing Gingrich was right about - figuring out how to slow the process down just has to be job one). Caring for demented is hideously expensive of course. And then there are those miracle drugs for psoriasis that I have mentioned. 3,000,000 folks with it, it doesn't kill you, you can have it for 40 years, and those biological drug shots cost about $800 every two weeks. You do the math.

So, grow the economy.

[Person Man]

Sadly, death panels are inevitable. Otherwise, in time, most of our GDP would be spent on healthcare - an absolute impossibility of course. It is one of those hard truths that cannot be escaped, that nobody wants to talk about. Where the rubber really meets the road is when all those folks living longer, live into dementia. I read somewhere that about 50% of males by their late 80's have dementia. I also recall from somewhere that the incidence of dementia in the next 20 years will grow by five fold absent medical progress in technology to slow the process down (that was the one thing Gingrich was right about - figuring out how to slow the process down just has to be job one). Caring for demented is hideously expensive of course. And then there are those miracle drugs for psoriasis that I have mentioned. 3,000,000 folks with it, it doesn't kill you, you can have it for 40 years, and those biological drug shots cost about $800 every two weeks. You do the math.

That's the entire thing about "death panels". If there's nothing you can actually do about something, there's nothing you can do and between the hospices I have seen and the hospitals I have seen, I would prefer the hospice if I did not have the legal, filial or financial support needed to dictate how it ends for me. Further, you actually have to have health care (medicine that works) before you can provide people access to it.

[Warren 4 Secretary of Everything]

Heilemann has always been the better (and more like able) of the two.

[Link]

Well if people actually listen to what the guy is saying he is just saying that money can't be spent endlessly on everyone.  Which is a law of the physical universe not Obamacare.  He mentions that currently people do run into spending caps on their insurance plans.  No one is going to kill you or withdraw care if you have the cash to keep paying them.  What Halperin was saying is that the government and private insurance pools will have to abdicate from the responsibility of unlimited spending.  So if you save a few million dollars when the government says it makes no more sense to spend money on heroic efforts you can pay for them out of pocket.  Which seems reasonable.  Why forgo vaccinating a thousand children in order to perform some heroic surgery on an 80 year old widower with advanced dementia and stage IV cancer?

[bedstuy]

Well if people actually listen to what the guy is saying he is just saying that money can't be spent endlessly on everyone.  Which is a law of the physical universe not Obamacare.  He mentions that currently people do run into spending caps on their insurance plans.  No one is going to kill you or withdraw care if you have the cash to keep paying them.  What Halperin was saying is that the government and private insurance pools will have to abdicate from the responsibility of unlimited spending.  So if you save a few million dollars when the government says it makes no more sense to spend money on heroic efforts you can pay for them out of pocket.  Which seems reasonable.  Why forgo vaccinating a thousand children in order to perform some heroic surgery on an 80 year old widower with advanced dementia and stage IV cancer?

Because Republicans don't care about health, they care about profits for the industries involved.  Thus, they want to prioritize the most expensive care.  Most vaccines are just a few dollars of profit, while a long hospital stay can be tens of thousands of dollars.  And, just like how Lexus makes more per car than Hyundai, the providers are going to prefer to deal in expensive care to make a profit.