yepers ALL you's b&r's .....why stop at over 80's .....how about handi's , AH OH yea & you NAZI'S ..um sher ...you's guys have "plenty" of other "idea's" fer the REST of us guys? ......don't you! ..how much for an Heart trans,um you need a new what? Sorry Mrs & Mr .....it costs ??? & according to "our" chart? ....it would "be" sooooooooooooo much better from little ??? ......um where's my hammer ? just an sec here OH um yea here it is! .............watch the birdie.
CORRECTION: This turns out to be a badly flawed chart.
That per capita health care spending is higher on older people than
younger ones will surprise nobody. Nor will it surprise anyone to learn
that American health care spending is systematically higher than what
you see in other rich countries. But this chart via Austin Frakt and Dan Munro is pretty shocking.
Starting in the mid-fifties, American per capita health care spending
goes from marginally higher than Germany or Sweden to a lot higher.
Then as Americans reach their late sixties, a large share of that
spending is shifted onto the public books as Medicare and the spending
gap keeps on rising.
Read Frakt for a bit of an account of how this arises operationally,
but what I think is more important is that it arises on a meta-level
because we have such a fragmented health care system. When your health
care spending is all in one bucket, then at any given level of spending you face a question about how to allocate
it. And when allocating spending between young and old, you're
cross-pressured. On the one hand, older people have more need for health
care services which militates in favor of allocating spending to them.
On the other hand, providing health care services to younger people
generally offers better value in terms of years of life and
quality of life saved. A 25 year-old who's in a bad car accident can, if
found in time and treated, still live a very happy and healthy life. If
you're 95 and get into the same car accident, then treatment is going
to be much more difficult, recovery will be much less complete, and in
the grand scheme of things you're not going to live very long anyway.
In all countries, the majority of health care spending goes to the
older half of the population distribution in deference to the greater
demand for health care services among the elderly. But the less unified,
less planned American system takes this to the extreme. To an extent,
this reflects what people want. The "death panels" charge was a potent
one for a reason. But not only is this health care spending on the
elderly the key issue in the federal budget, our disproportionate
allocation of health care dollars to old people surely accounts for the
remarkable lack of apparent cost effectiveness of the American health
care system. When the patient is already over 80, the simple fact of the
matter is that no amount of treatment is going to work miracles in
terms of life expectancy or quality of life.
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