A new study reveals that while 15 percent of Americans had zero health care costs in 2009, almost half of our nation’s $2.5 trillion in health care spending was consumed by only five percent of the population, mostly people with multiple chronic illnesses like high blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis, coronary artery disease and other debilitating ailments.
That’s five percent of the population consuming almost nine percent of GDP. On health care alone. Which raises the question: Why don’t we just kill all the sick people? Or at the very least, stop paying for their care?
I know that sounds harsh, but think about it. 52 million adult Americans currently lack health insurance, while another 73 million have difficulty paying for their health care, and 75 million say they defer treatment because they can’t afford it. Yet if we just stopped treating the sickest five percent amongst us—only 15 million people—we could fully cover the remaining 95 percent of Americans, with money to spare. And with this nearly universal preventative coverage, fewer Americans would ultimately develop the sort of multiple chronic illnesses that are now sucking our health care system dry. It’s a no brainer.
Yeah, that’s rationing, I guess. “Death panels” and all that. But we’re already rationing now, the only difference being that in our current system we sacrifice care for 125 million under- and uninsured Americans in order to lavish half our health care spending on a mere 15 million. Where’s the sense in that?
Sure, we’re a wealthy nation that could afford to take care of all of its citizens if we chose to. But Republicans keep reminding us that these are difficult economic times requiring difficult economic decisions… and by “difficult,” they generally mean slashing aid and services to our nation’s most needy. So why should our approach to health care be any different?
Is this a joke?
The reason it’s so important for everyone to be covered is that you don’t always know who is going to end up in that sickest 5%. Covering everyone is an insurance policy for yourself. Maybe you’ll luck out and be a part of the 15% who don’t need care this year. But that’s a big fucking maybe.
Universal coverage is about having the peace of mind to build a future with your family.
Now that’s the kind of innovative thinking that’ll win you the RepubliKKKan nomination and the presidency. Think about all the profits that Halliburton and Xe will make when they’re contracted to kill off 15 million people! They might as well round up the uppity abortionist wimmins and The Hummuhssssekshals while they’re at it–$! $! $! Call it the “Path to Prosperity” and you’ve got yourself a 21st century New Deal!
multiple chronic illnesses like high blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis, coronary artery disease and other debilitating ailments.”
Goldy has finally figured out that 70% of healthcare costs in the US are lifestyle related: heart disease, diabetes and hyper tension. The ‘fat lazy fuckers’ diseases. Basically people who take shit care of themselves and then expect everyone else to pick up the tab.
Fuck ’em and their $50,000 gastric bypass surgeries.
“with this nearly universal preventative coverage, fewer Americans would ultimately develop the sort of multiple chronic illnesses”
Yeah, right, they’re gonna give up their shit lifestyles because a doctor told them to….sure….right…..hmmm.
@1:
History learnin’ is hard, isn’t it?
Here’s something more substantive to gnaw on:
Sounds like a great idea to me.
@1 No. This is 100% humorless seriousness. And like everything else in the world, its a total black and white issue. You’re either on board with the good guys or you’re evil.
I know, right? And just think of how much faster your commute would be if they didn’t have to pick up all them cripples! Wait, I think that was somebody else.
@3,
When you fall down the stairs and break your neck, or get hit by a car and lose your legs, or inherit a disease, don’t expect any of us to pick up your tab because of your lifestyle choices.
You chose to take the stairs, you chose to put yourself in a place you might have been hit by a car, your lazy ass parents chose to procreate and stick everyone else with the bill.
You get cancer? Pay for the treatment yourself! You chose to remain alive instead of offing yourself and letting the rest of us keep our hard-earned dollars.
There’s other ways to slice the data though. Most of a person’s health care spending happens in the final weeks of life.
So you can afford to buy insulin for diabetics over many years if you stop putting Grandma in the ICU.
Very Swift Goldy, very Swift. Love it.
@1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Pr…
Well, isn’t this basically the GOP platform with regards to health care already?
@3 I have osteoarthritis and my boyfriend has type 1 diabetes. We’re both 21 years old, near the lower end of healthy BMIs for our heights, are physically active and eat a health-conscience vegetarian diet. Not everyone with a life-long chronic illness gets it because they’re a fat lazy fuck, some of us just loose the genetic lottery.
And I’m not eating up anyone else’s health care dollars because I can’t afford to see a physical therapist regularly 🙁
Also I hope this is a troll, Goldy.
I know this is hyperbole, but it contains a grain of truth: some rationing will have to happen (mainly around end-of-life care for terminal patients), or the system will go bankrupt.
This is what they do in Republican states …
I know the New Yorker isn’t popular around here, but they actually had a pretty interesting article on lowering health care costs by improving care for the most expensive percentiles.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/…
I’m assuming Goldy knows about the eugenics initiative under the National Socialist dictatorship in Germany. Under the T4 and other programs, not only did the government imposed forced sterilization on people with heritary diseases but it also imposed “euthanasia” on the mentally ill, idle, weak, and other “lebensunwerte Leben” (lives not with living). (Incidentally, that included homosexuals.)
Yes, ha ha, Goldy’s proposal is a very funny play on Nazi eugenics. Yes, good one, ha ha.
Something very sinister starts brewing when we start looking at a health care system in terms of monetary numbers alone and lose complete sight of the human beings whom the system (inadequately) serves.
You know what, Goldy – sure. Let’s do this. But we start with YOUR family first. See how long that perspective lasts.
I hate to invoke Godwin’s Law, but that though process sounds AWFULLY familiar….
I has a sad about how many people are not getting this troll. :'(
This is a good idea, but it should be taken a step further. What’s the use in simply letting the sick people die? I have it on good authority that human flesh is delicious. Let’s cart all the sick people to slaughterhouses and butcher them for meat. Grind them up, irradiate them, and we’ve got us some profits for a well-connected agribusiness corporation. It’s a win-win!
Fuck you Goldy, I hope you get cancer of the dick.
@17 First you have to convince people that they have no right to live forever and in perfect health. Promises of eternal life & happiness have been best sellers for a long time, so that’s going to be a tough one to change.
This is a good post. Of course, people who use those statistics to actually push for less coverage and higher rates, never publish data that clearly proves countries with universal health care have both lower costs and lower incidences of lifestyle related chronic illness.
@5 The Supreme Court was never going to overturn the personal mandate, the personal mandate is what assures the healthcare industry of tens of millions of new customers while the Affordable Health Care Act does almost nothing to make healthcare affordable.
The possibility exists that we’ll work off the framework of the Affordable Healthcare Act to bring down costs, aka that our politicians will support less money going to the health insurance industry, but for some reason I doubt it.
If the personal mandate was struck down, universal coverage would be the only non-insane game left in town. That’s why the personal mandate is safer than Fort Knox.
Ugh Goldy. Are you having a lazy day?
Go report on something and stop with the cliche column shit.
Brilliant proposal, Goldy.
And @3 nails it.
But don’t forget how expensive it is to treat that nasty 100% lifestyle induced AIDA epidemic.
Shouldn’t the infected be euthanized before they can infect others?
AIDA!!
damn that operatic disease….
“AIDS”……
Swift did this so much better. You’d have done better to plagairize his work outright than change a term or two and pretend you didn’t. Alas poor Goldy. Neither wit nor intelligence nor any ability to write.
Good thing you work for a thing like the Stranger where wit, intelligence and good writing style aren’t wanted.
Oh, Goldy. Sometimes I think you are an ignorant jackass, but sometimes I adore you. Today is one of the latter times.
And I love that there is a shitstorm – albeit a mild category 2, perhaps – in the comments in spite of the obvious. I admit the unregistered dickbags so enthusiastically agreeing are a little depressing, though.
Religious people are more likely to choose expensive, painful treatments long after any hope of recovery/extending life is gone, increasing health costs for the rest of us. The real solution for our budget woes is to kill religion.
@31, Sit on a fence-post.
The solution is to spend your whole life doing nothing but occasionally moving around in your bed to avoid clots and bedsores. But for God’s sake, don’t actually SIT up, as that incurs all sorts of health problems over time. Don’t work in front of a computer, and don’t watch TV. But also be sure to avoid actual manual labor as much as possible, as that also leads to your body breaking down gradually. Strenuous exercise will do the same. Eat raw organic foods exclusively. Anything else and you’re just asking for diabetes, cancer, and/or heart problems. When you turn 62, kill yourself; after that it’s all downhill.
@27 *Correction*, I mean to type The Affordable Care Act. We’ve all called it Obamacare so much I forgot the actual name.
@31:
>2011
>still can’t understand sarcasm
Why stop there? Sick babies suck up tons of resources, too. We can now identify dozens of genetic markers for birth defects and chronic disease later in life. How about amnio and extensive genetic testing for all pregnancies in order to get a “birth license”. Without a birth license, abortion would be mandatory. Then, we’d have healthier citizens and wouldn’t spend so much for healthcare.
/sarcasm
(By the way, if you build a decent, comprehensive national healthcare system, you can take care of everyone for less than half of what we spend now for taking care of only some.)
Apparently, SB has recovered sufficiently from his most recent ass-kicking from SLOG commentors, and has returned for a new round.
“THANK YOU SIR! MAY I HAVE ANOTHER?”
Why, of course SB. Just bend over and grab those ankles. You know the drill…
@39
Sorry Comte, I always forget that for 13 year olds like yourself the repeated use of gratuitous profanity counts for wit and intelligence and writing skill.
When you’ve grown up you’ll realize it’s the recourse of a small mind with no linguistic ability or imagination. Or you just refuse to grow up and you start writing for the Stranger.
Goldy, you’ve been getting sick a lot and falling down, too, if I recall correctly. Did you get permission to breed?
Hits way too close to home to digest as a thoughtful critique of the political environment. I’m in my 30s, have worked full time all of my adult life (i.e., from the time I was 17) and was diagnosed with MS a couple of years ago. Have what I thought was great insurance through my job, but the company has fought paying every step of the way, the bills keep rolling in and I am starting to submerge. And if things get worse for me and reduce my employability – FUCK! I also do everything reasonably in my power to stay well: totally changed my diet, strict exercise routine, etc. But it wasn’t until faced with these health & mobility issues that I realized how unaccommodating the world is, even with the current protections some people fought so hard to accomplish. And since this satire also dovetails with a possible actual policy (as it’s been done before), it just upsets my stomach.
Riiiiiiiggggghhhht SB because writers like D.H. Lawrence, Dorothy Parker, James Joyce, Normal Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Chuck Palahniuk, Tom Robbins, Erica Jong, William Shakespeare, – just to name a handful off the top of my head – who all make copious use of profanities in their writing, are pure fucking HACKS in comparison to thy literary greatness, yes?
So once again, do us all a big ole’ favor: STFU and go do something for which you have some actual aptitude, like diddling yourself in the bathroom before your mom calls in to dinner – it’s not like you’re going to use those five minutes for anything more productive, know what I mean?
@43, you forget that all of those people were considered great before Sb started paying attention. No one new is allowed to do anything edgy or nontraditional, because hey, “Are you comparing yourself to Shakespeare?!?!!!” It’s really change that reactionary types so adamantly opposed to, not any particular philosophy. Things should always be the way he foggily remembers them being when he was a young adult, and anything that’s different is scary and bad.
As callous as this sounds, after working in a hospital, I completely endorse cutting off care for many of these “frequent fliers” as we’ve termed them. There are many people who’ve realized that they can basically live off the health care system, and there are many who it’s simply not worth pumping their heart for them while they lie comatose waiting to die.
This waste astounds me daily, and would be so much better spent on people who need reasonable care and cannot get it because the frequent fliers use up freakish amounts of resources. Even Hippocrates would turn Kevorkian on some of these people.
I realize I’m taking the bait, but let’s put you guys to the test. What would you say if there was a guy so totally fucked in the brain who would frequently hurt himself, run in traffic, set himself on fire, and be otherwise batshit constantly? Should we continually do expensive skingrafts on those burns? Cast his leg that he feels like breaking?
This is not a hypothetical.
@38 – I’ll do you one better. Let’s do that genetic testing, and the babies that aren’t up to snuff, we just go ahead and eat.
Ew, I wouldn’t want to eat a genetically tainted baby @47; what if I were to get teh “Mad Baby Brain Disease”?
No, I want my baby-steaks USDA certified, preferably Prime Grade.
I take my comment back. about 1/2 of the commenters didn’t get it, so no cliche.
@48 – It’s okay, we’ll just feed the reject babies to poor people. From a chain of Planned Lunch-in-the-Hood fast-food restaurants.
@15: No, the GOP’s platform is to kill the poor, while Goldy’s is to kill the sick.
I love that people missed the “Modest Proposal” part of this. Yes, indeed, it’s meant to be a diatribe so heartless that you have to sit up and take notice…like eating babies. It doesn’t make him serious. Note the part where he said that we could avoid most of these problems with good preventative care.
My SIL is a type-1 diabetic. When she and my bro were in the process of getting married, she came to the point that she would be dropped from her parents’ insurance (her parents’ insurance cut you off at 22 regardless of whether you were in school or not). They got married post-haste because her medications would have cost her $2000/month and my bro had insurance. Now, she did nothing wrong to have juvenile diabetes, and can do nothing but treat her condition unless and until permanent treatments are developed, but adult-onset diabetes can be just as expensive to treat, AND can be prevented.
I consume a lot of healthcare compared to your average notquitethirtysomething to remain at a normal weight and maintain general good health and avoid all the bad stuff that comes with being overweight and in poor health. While that treatment can become expensive, it’s nothing compared to what would be paid out to treat the diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, sleep apnea, and other ill effects of being severely overweight. If you consider that diabetes can cost as much as $2000/month to treat on medications alone (my experience), the couple thousand dollars a year I spend to avoid that plus many other issues is money well spent. I think that’s the point being made here…pay now or pay later. We have decided we’re not willing to let people die of treatable diseases, so the best, most efficient thing we can do is prevent those diseases to the best of our ability. That’s NOT what we’re doing under our current system, and we CAN do better, without going bankrupt.