Healthcare 1 - The Hard Truth and 4 Hard Questions

This might be the most honesty you have ever heard about healthcare in one place.  Mind, you, that’s a really low bar.  Unfortunately our conversation on healthcare is not characterized by a high degree of honesty at the moment.  Instead we get shadings of the truth and ducking of the hard questions.  Everybody does it, but at this moment in time it’s the Medicare for All people that are doing it the most, that have the most tenuous connection with the truth. 

But we will have to face the hard truth and answer these hard questions if we are ever going to fix our healthcare system. The hardest truth in healthcare is that we can’t afford to spend an unlimited amount of money to save any one person.  We just can’t.   

Starting from that hard truth, we have four really hard questions:

1 How much money do we spend to keep any one person alive?

2 Do we spend the same amount for everyone, or different amounts for different individuals?

3 Does the amount we spend on a person depend on how responsible that person is?

4 And finally, Are the death committees run by the government or by private insurance companies?

No amount of magical thinking by the Medicare for All crowd will make these questions go away..