Health Care

Healthcare is a snakepit. You can't have a system of any kind that gives everybody the best possible healthcare. Even mundane care if provided to everyone, can produce mindboggling costs.

Use Steve Jobs as an example. Pancreatic cancer is not curable but death can be delayed, sometimes significantly. First, you get a Whipple procedure. You need a really good surgeon and it takes all day. He guts you like cleaning a fish for dinner, then reconnects what little is left. Convalescence takes a really long time and there will be complications and surgical revisions, no matter how otherwise healthy and young you are. If they do everything right, when you heal, you can eat but you won't digest anything. You'll need to have intravenous nutrition for the rest of however long you live. It's amazingly expensive and the risk of sepsis is extemely high, no matter how much care is taken.

Even with all of this, the cancer will metastasize and must then be dealt with. Chemo, radiation, organ transplants, all these can eventually be done if the patient lives long enough.

From the minute you decide to aggressively treat pancreatic cancer you are committing to millions of dollars a year in costs.

Given a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, most people are willing to submit to any measures necessary to stay alive. Even if it's not for that long.

There are a whole shitload of diseases just as expensive to treat as pancreatic cancer. There are some that are more expensive. Steve Jobs is a billionaire. If it costs him 10 or 15 million a year to stay alive, it's no problem for him. If we commit to treating everybody aggressively for every disease we can, it's a whole different matter. When those "Culture of Life" fuckheads get involved, it will be even worse. You think they're bad now, just wait.

There's maybe a billion people out of the six or seven billion on earth who are starving to death. There are a lot of places where the life expectancy is under 40 years. In many of these places, birth control is not practiced and consensual sex is not a recognized concept. Basic sanitation infrastructure is absent. Basic health care is not even productive in these areas. Lowering the infant mortality rate makes conditions worse in the long term. Maybe comprehensive health care is not where we should be focusing our best efforts right now.

I'd like to see Americans get basic health care. It seems to me though that we haven't even decided what that is yet. It seems to me that old people and poor people already get too much free health care, while the uninsured don't seek treatment even when sick for fear of burdening their families with unpayable bills. There's no way that's fair.