My understanding of economics is rudimentary, but in my studies the basic law of supply and demand in determining the price of a good struck me as both cruel and ironic in the case of health care.
What is reasonable demand in the economic sense of the word for long healthy life? How much is that worth to you in a "free market"? One possible answer is "How much have you got?" Another approach is "How much can you beg, borrow, or steal?"
My diagnosis of the problem goes to the psychological aspects related to the operative assumption that everyone is entitled to optimum health and longevity. There is a measure of political correctness in this premise; to examine it raises immediate questions of the care of the invalid (not my word, mind you, but telling isn't it?) We must not be accused of discarding the "challenged" of our society, and that includes ourselves as we age and our health, in every case, declines.
Nevertheless, included in our premise that we are entitled to the best health and medical care and quality of life that money can buy, is the economics of demand. Can we ask, "But at what cost?" without casting ourselves as fratricidal or suicidal? Do we disqualify our opinion by suggesting that there is a sane limit to what ought to be spent in the pursuit of health and its benefits?
I think it is easy to construct this fortress of thought in the arena of healthcare, to appeal to this basic assumption, to express horror whenever the idea of a limit to expenditures is proferred. Nobody wants that.
Oh, except for the healthcare managers, huh. The companies that offer us "coverage" for whatever the hell may happen to ail us. Their assumption is that our collective ability to pay exceeds the cost of our collective care, and their job is to drive the curve in their corporate favor. This however appears to me to be a tenuous assumption, given the exploding costs of the medical system we now have.
We should get over the fact that we will almost all get sick, we will certainly all die. Buddhists meditate on their deaths; perhaps this is the simple cure for the demand for health care. Ask the physician to heal you or palliate your discomfort, not to bleed you dry.
There's more to this picture. There is the temporary but monstrously enormous wealth accumulated by the boomer generation. Plug the healthcare profits spigot into that reservoir, not just the capital but the credit lines, and you have set the stage for a major transfer of wealth to the medical industry over the next few decades.
Once this transfer of wealth is complete, the younger generation, the yuppie generation if you will, will necessarily reform the system and get a reasonable universal healthcare system like most civilized countries now have. But in the meantime, by failing to examine the premise that we are entitled to spend money we don't even have on living longer, we play into this game.
Life causes dying. Get over it already.