re: #377 harpsicon

Talk about snark… Pulllease…

If the “death panels” part hadn’t been located in the section of the health care bill concerned with cost containment, I might have believed that the Democrats merely wanted us to talk about the eventualities of getting old.

The “Get Sick and Die” meme from the idiot Dem congressman in Florida (a big ACORN man, btw) would seemingly be more appropriate as a hoped-for outcome of Obamacare, where cost containment seems to be so high on the needs list…

Let’s be honest—a huge problem with the staggering expense of American health care is that people demand all kinds of expensive futile care for frail elderly people who are at the end of their lives.

I went for my first mammogram last week (Dr yelled; I’m well past 40; no lumps or problems so I ignored it). Anyway, in most parts of the US, super fancy “breast imaging centers” have gone up over the last decade or so. I sat in the waiting room with lots of octogenarians who got their mammograms and cheerfully scheduled their annual exam for next year. The place was fancier (granite, gleaming hardwood, high end furniture, etc) than any hotel I’ve ever stayed in. I was by far the youngest person there, and the only one whose exam wasn’t paid for by medicare.

Sorry, but that’s hugely wasteful. A mammogram could very well be done in a plain hospital radiology department. And I’m not sure we need to pay for octogenarians to get annual mammograms. I guarantee I won’t want to undergo major surgery and radiation/chemotherapy in my 80s. I’d only do it now because my kids are still young and my husband deploys overseas.

Death panel? Nope. But don’t tell me that medicare isn’t providing a level of care that an awful lot of Americans don’t have access to, or that paying for mammograms every three years instead of every year after age 70 would be a better use of government resources.

Now, medicare is going to bankrupt us if we keep it going in its current form. The US has a huge population compared to the UK and Canada. We can’t afford to insure every American with the public option.