2008 Jack Arcalon

a series about the healthcare mafia

1. the health insurance 'debate'
Mainstream commentators and pundits (Krugman, Quindlen, Ivins) believe healthcare is too important to have a price. The government should hide its true cost and pretend it's 'free'.
To them, the right to healthcare is infinitely more valuable than the time and effort of those forced to pay for it.
Everyone should be forced to buy a minimum level of health insurance, which would be subsidized (or artificially price-inflated) depending on their income, under penalty of government violence if they refuse. They could buy additional non-essential health services on the side.
To pundits, healthcare is a human right. Thousands of people forced to get up early for high-stress commutes to abusive jobs are utterly insignificant compared to one extra day in the life of a coma patient, even if it costs a million dollars to provide that added day. Taxpayers should work even harder so they can pay more taxes.
In a 2006 American survey, 40% of respondents said a terminally ill person should be kept alive as long as possible, REGARDLESS OF THE COST.
The quality of the added time doesn't matter, just the amount. The Democrats have become the strongest pro-life group in the US, though the Republicans began to catch up again under W. Bush.
The only flicker of resistance was when a few members in the audience cheered at a 2011 Republican debate, when a candidate suggested taxpayers should not subsidize an indigent patient's healthcare.
As far as mainstream commentators are concerned, the matter is settled. Governments will help themselves to tens of trillions of dollars to give to healthcare firms.

2. the true costs
Almost no patient can afford the unbelievably expensive treatments that have been invented in the past fifty years.
Every health insurance firm in the US, and in most First World countries, is required to pay for a long list of staggeringly expensive procedures.
These include infertility treatments, preventive surgeries, rehab, unfathomably expensive intensive care, transplants, and mental health services.
Most healthcare is purchased at the end of life in an attempt to delay death by a few months - nationally, about $75,000,000,000.00 per year in added Medicare costs alone.
US Medicaid costs will soon surpass the combined economic output of Africa. It costs $70,000 per year to maintain the average dementia sufferer in a nursing home. Two years cost more than a new house.
A serious car accident costs more than most victims can earn in a lifetime.
Even worse, 'preemies' need dozens of surgeries to survive, requiring tens of thousands of person-hours in actual labor, and years of study and preparation.
The ultra-expensive treatments can't be withheld even when they won't do any good. Relatives insist the services be provided, and hospitals have to do exactly as they're told, even though they know they won't be paid.
These expensive mandates mostly subsidize the elderly and those with chronic conditions.
In rare cases, patients voluntarily purchase the most expensive treatments, but usually the taxpayer does, directly or in the form of higher insurance premiums.
Most people capable of making such decisions wouldn't voluntarily select this type of insurance, preferring to keep the money for themselves; but they have no choice, except for the one they made at the ballot box.

3. MTPI (mandatory torture provision insurance)
Hillary Clinton and Rick Santorum want to bury people alive, but only after forcing them to pay for the privilege. Life can be unimaginably much worse than death. How much worse can things get?
Countless decrepit individuals are kept alive in hospital and long-term care beds. Many want to die, but are kept suffering indefinitely at the behest of our theocratically-inspired overlords, courtesy of the insurers and the taxpayers.
Some people in a persistent vegetative state have horrible remnants of awareness, but are unable to interact with the outside world in any way.
It's a bleak world, yet everyone must pay to prolong their stay here, a one-hell-fits-all compromise.
If I become blind or paralyzed, you are authorized to kill me. I have not the slightest interest in paying others to receive marginal life extension benefits either, except through voluntary charity.

4. passive euthanasia
Should we let many seriously sick people die?
Deader than a doornail!
For the most expensive conditions, the best answer is to do nothing, or to enact euthanasia (But not by doctors. You don't need an MD to kill).
Doing nothing is better than stealing from others, except in extremely painful emergencies where some socialism is appropriate.
Also (for anyone taking my advice) allow seriously defective newborns to die, or let their parents painlessly kill them to avoid a lifetime of medical interventions. They barely have potential consciousness anyway.
It should be illegal to advocate such actions! How could anyone say something so horrible?
Simple: I've carefully analyzed world conditions from an existential perspective, and there's not a glimmer of hope. That's just one opinion, of course: maybe homeless people secretly love their lives.
Unless things change, I plan to stay out of the way for now.
Workers have to jump through an amazing array of bureaucratic hoops to earn their first dollar. Yet any politician can spend it on a whim.
Every job I've had was a tedious, drawn-out ordeal, and I've had it good by comparison. I can do the work mind you, I'm just really annoyed by it.
The amount of necessary suffering (in labor and taxes) to keep a disabled infant alive is larger than anyone can imagine. A hundred thousand man hours will be required, a lifetime of mundane stress.
Having experienced an infinitesimal yet immense fraction of this annoyance, I have calculated it's not worth it. Anyone who disagrees is free to do so at their own expense.

There are many things that people want. Billions are already allowed to die prematurely. Few tears are shed for the impoverished masses of the hell countries. They're not as bad as they used to be, but worse than you think. Millions of suicides each year could be delayed by giving the victims money.
Others can't afford the cheap tests, check-ups, and medications that would add years to their lives, often because these tests are illegal due to excessive regulation.
I demand the government spend one quadrillion dollars on me!
Perhaps I don't have the right to make people work extremely hard for my benefit, if they REALLY don't want to do that?
They have their own priorities. Does that automatically give me the right to steal their lives? Krugman thinks that the State should set the priorities, and rigorously enforce them at gunpoint.

5. cost reduction
My salary will always be as minuscule as I can get away with. I'm in favor of affordable healthcare by reducing costs by any means necessary.
Without mandates it would still be pretty expensive, but with increased efficiencies the costs could be reduced by 90%.
Great forces stand united to prevent this from happening.
It would be highly illegal to provide only a limited menu of healthcare services. If an insurer tried to cover only the most cost-effective procedures, the police would literally shoot them dead (Actually, they would take management into custody).
The reason is mandated coverage, which varies slightly between states and countries. Politically favored patient advocacy groups have forced all insurers to cover a long list of expensive conditions, thereby tripling your premiums. The young subsidize the old regardless of personal circumstances.
The fact that more people have to die because they can't afford any health insurance is irrelevant politically, since the dead don't vote.

6. the illegal Wal-Mart solution
It would be straightforward to create a no-frills free market in healthcare products, including regular check-ups, assembly-line surgical techniques, and generic drugs.
Right now, drug prices often exceed $100 per pill, a sign of the pathological decline and failure of 'Third Way' capitalism.
The world needs more open-source drug development trials.

7. the opt out option
The government could establish a default health insurance account for everyone.
Anyone who refuses to participate would be informed they are jeopardizing their future health, and should immediately make an appointment with an insurance agent.
Fully informed of the consequences, they could then tell the government to go to hell. Instead, they could choose to purchase cheaper healthcare by waiving the right to sue for medical malpractice, relying on arbitration instead. That's a right consumers currently don't have.

8. the end of health insurance
Private health insurance will become impractical within a few decades. Genetic screening can already tell an insurer how much healthcare a specific policy holder will likely need, allowing them to charge higher premiums for hidden conditions.
It might still be possible to provide basic no frills coverage, and accident insurance for everyone, but the genetically disadvantaged patients would be out of luck in an ideal free-market.

The current patchwork of US healthcare providers is highly inefficient. A single payer system would definitely save money, but that's not the only option.
All private insurance could be pooled through a federal agency, creating new efficiencies of scale. This is also a tenet of libertarian socialism.
MediCom, a voluntary unification network, would keep everyone's medical records unless they opted out (which would be foolish to do). Almost everyone would voluntarily participate to some degree, the same way almost everyone voluntarily accepts money for services rendered now.
The government could contribute up to $10,000 in benefits per year per patient.

9. the worst case scenario
So, what if you can't afford the expensive insurance plan that you need to pay for your expensive condition?
A minority of people requires insanely expensive treatments to survive, and everyone else is expected to pay for them in the form of highly elevated premiums. Otherwise, these patients would certainly die sooner.
This is the core problem of healthcare reform.
Some people will inevitably die, when they could have been cured with sufficient money.

Right now everyone is forced at gunpoint to make immense sacrifices to keep a small group of patients alive.
Much better to ban the most expensive medical treatments than to force others to pay for them, if those are the only two choices.
What if everyone had to make a tolerable sacrifice to keep only one person alive?
Since we're still taking my advice: even then the cumulative suffering across society would dwarf the benefit of the cure, even if you don't factor in the force needed to collect the tax.
Does anyone have the courage to refuse to pay for a service they don't want?

10. the last resort: charity.
A network of charities could always pay for some treatments for patients with no other options, especially if the recipient is photogenic enough.
Volunteers could train themselves to develop and provide experimental therapies.
Preferably, healthcare charity would be provided through an alliance like the March of Dimes.
It would become the insurer of last resort, relying on goodwill instead of money. Everyone would be encouraged to donate generously to their favorite hospital or research cause.
To create even stronger incentives to donate, the network would keep track of who gives what, as a percentage of their income.
If you won't donate enough to charity when you're able to, you won't receive enough aid when you need it the most.

2008 Jack Arcalon

The great healthcare scam

In March 2005, president Bush departed his Crawford, Texas ranch aboard his Marine Corps helicopter, looking unusually grim. After landing in Waco, he quickly climbed the stairs to Air Force One, ignoring the waiting reporters' shouted questions. This was serious business.
Bush traveled across the country in his government 747 ($50,000 per hour, a swimming pool of fuel, 1000 tons of CO2) to sign a piece of paper to keep an undead corpse known as Terri Schiavo alive. He considered it in very poor taste to mention the cost of this undertaking (his mother might not have thought that). After all, what price can you put on a human life, regardless of its actual condition? Money is irrelevant in a situation like that.

This is the holy scripture of all healthcare activists, commentators, pundits, and reporters. The right of taxpayers to keep their hard-earned cash vanishes like snow before a hydrogen bomb when matters of human life extension are at stake.
These costs will steadily ratchet upwards as the healthcare-political complex implements 'cost controlled' and sometimes 'free' healthcare for everybody, whether they want to pay for it or not. Perhaps two hundred million Americans do want the worst-of-all-worlds compromise known as 'Obamacare', and it looks like it can't be stopped anymore.
The cost expansions might as well be supernatural in our ability to control them.
It just doesn't matter if future generations have to pay interest on the national debt for the next thousand years. Hard work in the future kills fewer people than lack of healthcare today.

The current healthcare system is already more wasteful than communism, a bit like funneling money into a quasar. Instead of concentrating on basic survival and prevention services it's set up to benefit interest groups in the prime of political power.
Most healthcare expenses take place at the end of life, when the recipients can't enjoy them anyway. It happens in every nursing home and extended care facility, huge 'farms' keeping humanoid plants alive at a gigantic cost. Some unlucky patients still have hidden brain functions. Misdiagnosis of Persistent Vegetative State is common. Thousands of people have been buried alive in their own bodies, tortured worse than anyone can imagine. Reportedly some try to commit suicide by holding their breath.

Many things can be said about modern medical care, but not that it's pleasant. The most expensive procedures allow unfortunate patients to live a few months longer in agony. People who would otherwise have died at birth can live highly restricted lives thanks to respirators, motorized wheelchairs, voice synthesizers, physical therapists and attendants. Some even have offspring through IVF or artificial insemination (often a mandatory health insurance component).

When all our infrastructure and social achievements have collapsed and vanished without a trace, what will our society leave behind?
Among other things, a great deal of negative evolution: millions of bad gene variants that would have been weeded out or become scarcer without medical intervention. That's probably a good thing: it will create more human biodiversity, and stimulate unorthodox research. Too many chronic genetic diseases may finally persuade humans to give up their hopelessly defective bodies.

But that will take ages. In the short term, the future looks extremely expensive.
Programs like Medicaid are less about the quality of life than about its continuation at all cost. By their nature they can only expand. Emergency rooms and ICU's in the few rich nations continue to spend tens of millions of dollars for a few extra minutes of life, often without compensation. An extended stay in a state of the art cardiology ward can cost a million dollars, with no copays, deductibles, or even drug bills if the patient can't pay them - at least until they're kicked out. Parents demand their irrevocably brain-dead offspring be kept alive indefinitely regardless of the cost, and there is no way for hospitals to refuse.

The downside of all this mandatory charity is hundreds of additional labor hours for every taxpayer, plus increased unemployment for many stymied would-be taxpayers. As of 2012, hidden unemployment exceeds 15%.
Taxpayers forcibly surrender a massive percentage of their income so others can afford a product they desire.
Why not give every homeless person a free tiny apartment? According to those who make these decisions, healthcare is more important, a 'fundamental right'.

What if someone would prefer to spend their hard-earned money on a bigger home, prostitutes, homeopathic research, or even on their own health care instead of other people's?
They could certainly do that if they didn't mind the police shooting them dead for tax resistance.

This evil force can't be infinitely powerful. The economy is already too sluggish to pay for the current gold-plated system, yet progress continues unabated. In the future, there will be trillion-dollar techniques to replace most body cells, or rewrite their genomes. Socialist democracies like Sweden may impose 90% tax rates to pay for them. The United States will probably be bankrupt by then.

What is to be done? Quite possibly, there will be a slow, orderly collapse. Politicians are not just unwilling, but unable to offend the most powerful interest groups, and most voters don't care. Still, it doesn't have to be that way.
In some imaginary ideal world, the new prime directive of healthcare should be: make it cheaper. Even I should be able to afford some pills and potions on my sub-minimum income.
There's only one way that could happen: rely on the free market to increase the supply. By law, it has been made extremely difficult to become a doctor or nurse. Much of the knowledge has been deliberately mystified. Medical students must study for almost a decade, with a grueling residency and medical boards to pass. Their real career only starts in their thirties.
The field needs to be vastly simplified by splitting it into sub-specialties.

The next step will be to unleash the full potential of mass production and automation. Make healthcare more impersonal, a factory rather than a hospital. This principle works for fast food, utilities, hotels, airlines. It has never been tried for healthcare, but most functions could be standardized. Consultants could explain what's happening to individual patients.
The increasing lifespans and demands of our senior citizens will make it necessary to invent 'software doctors' and maybe even robot surgeons. Immense expert systems will eventually be able to diagnose and monitor most diseases.
The above would of course require extensive deregulation, against almost unimaginable opposition from entrenched interests.

Medical research will also need to be decentralized.
Most remaining diseases such as cancer, autoimmune attacks, aging and obesity are stupendously complex. Progress has been much too slow, a scandal hidden in plain sight. At best, there are only a few more classical 'wonder drugs' left to discover. Real progress will be at opposite ends of the cost spectrum: cheaper and simpler life maintenance and accident mitigation, and new types of post-biological research such as nanotech and gene reprogramming.
Part of the solution is to encourage portions of the Third World to exploit their untapped brainpower, with research bounties and prizes and subsidized clinical trials. With too many dead-ends to ever become profitable, most future drugs will only emerge from open-source collaboration.

None of this can solve the ultimate problem of healthcare delivery. It has never been seriously discussed, not even by the tiny minority of mankind opposed to most taxes. If they had openly discussed the problem, their parties and candidates would have received even fewer votes, if that's possible.
The problem is easily stated: if, at some point in the future, charity will no longer be mandatory, then there will be a lot less of it; at least for some recipients.
Of course this is a purely hypothetical situation. Some form of social security will always exist no matter what.
Let's assume the government would agree to reimburse all medical costs up to $10,000 per person per year (not enough for one hour of treatment in the current system). Above that amount, voluntary charity would take over.
That seems fair. I have to trudge through five levels of hell to earn that kind of money (my main justification for tax relief).
The consequences of such a change would be profound.

Some people will always be more appealing than others. The disparity is even bigger in supposedly egalitarian societies. A minority of patients will inevitably receive more than their fair share of charity. AIDS research has been over-funded while diabetes was neglected.

Many people feel uncomfortable around the severely disabled, which translates into fewer donations.
The most expensive patients would not make it at all. Quadriplegics, those with senile dementia or brain damage, and high-risk or highly disabled transplant candidates would die for lack of medical care.

The free market will inevitably generate solutions mainstream ethicists will consider unacceptable. Some clients could only get health insurance if they got sterilized. Other plans would save money by covering euthanasia.
Of course this could only happen if governments were to become much less powerful in the future.

Ultimately, there will be a voluntary network of charities, perhaps government controlled for greater efficiency.
It will keep track of donations as a portion of income, and generally decide who gets what benefits (individual donors would still be able to override the collective judgment).
Left to its own devices, this imaginary system would still be inefficient, but no one would be forced to pay for other people's preferences.

Could such an unprecedented shift ever occur, especially now that the USA has made a permanent demographic swing to the left (Third World immigration combined with aging Boomers), traditional religion is on the rebound, the anti-tax movement has been marginalized, and Big Government is poised to become mightier than ever?

Only if, in the public mind, the quality of life becomes more important than its quantity. More people would need to be exposed to the horrors of Third World slums and First World nursing homes.
This seems unlikely. It might take slow catastrophes, a worldwide depression and sustained mass unemployment.
Of course, you might want to get a second opinion on that.

2009 Arcalon Media Service

the terminal spendathon

People work hard their whole lives for inadequate pay. A third or more of their income is seized in taxes.
Then at the very end, when they can't enjoy it anymore, the money flow suddenly gets reversed.
Trillions and trillions of tax dollars are spent to extend the lives of the elderly by a few months or years. It cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide round-the-clock nursing services for an individual with severe dementia. Families insist the still living bodies of their relatives receive advanced healthcare at insane expense.
In the USA, fiscally conservative Republicans happily 'invest' billions of dollars to prolong the existence of the living dead in extended care facilities. It costs the combined income of several workers to keep a severely handicapped individual alive. This is fine if the workers want to spend their incomes this way.

These costs will only worsen as massive new programs further ratchet up Medicaid and Medicare spending. The government calls it a stimulus. What kind of investment can never be paid back, but can only lead to more expenditures? It would be accurate to call it mandatory charity.

I call it evil: the mainstream belief that glorifies suffering. Instead of spending the money where it would be enjoyed, it's used to extend pain. Those who believe that long-term care facilities are better than death haven't spent much time there. If I'm reincarnated with cerebral palsy, I request to be killed at birth.
The last mental faculty lost is the ability to feel pain, but it's stronger than all the others combined.
The money spent prolonging human life could instead be spent on recreation and quality of life, starter homes and businesses, creating a new age of leisure.
This is separate from the question whether the government should be involved in healthcare at all.
So far, few people have dared to think that taxpayers should not be forced to finance others' spending preferences.
This will take a completely new kind of courage.

5/2/09-1/12 2009 Arcalon Media Service

against waste: in defense of selfish inactivity

Like other industries, the healthcare business exists to serve its own interests, but they have perfected it to a degree equaled only by the legal profession.
Healthcare services are delivered as part of an extremely expensive package. Doctors prefer to sell complex surgical procedures that cost more than a mansion. These are paid for by raising the prices of cheap, simple procedures that are more beneficial but less profitable.
This scam is only possible by systematically hiding the true costs. About 50% of US healthcare expenses are paid for by the taxpayers, with most of the remainder passing through health insurance companies.
Preventative healthcare has become unaffordable for those without insurance, which means that more people need heroic healthcare later in life. Once someone gets seriously ill with cancer or advanced heart disease, they can count on dozens of hospital stays and months of often painful recuperation.
Meanwhile, others can't afford a simple checkup, or to have a cavity filled.
This set-up is not cost-effective, but then it only needs to be profitable. In this respect, it's staggeringly successful. . . and things are only getting worse.

It's part of a larger trend.
The education system prefers to spend far more on disadvantaged students than on talented ones.
The legal system thrives on immense lawsuits that drag on for years, and result in billion-dollar lawyer fees for a few thousand hours of work.
The most wasteful example of all is of course the great Terror War.

My theory is that the passive vices are actually virtues, including laziness, stinginess, and even misanthropy. The world would be better off with less activity, instead of indiscriminate activity for its own sake.
This is particularly relevant to the healthcare system. The best thing that could happen would be the emergence of 'cheapskate patients' always looking for bargains, willing to question the increasingly overpriced procedures the system is marketing.
Trapped on a bad planet, people must suffer to earn money. Personally, I would rather not spend it to be tortured in a hospital late in life, or pay for others to receive this benefit.
Things will only improve when enough people realize that money is more valuable than life itself.

5/1/09-1/12 2010 Jack Arcalon

healthcare rant nr.5

The torture industry is booming.
In every First World country without exception, politicians are figuring out new ways to transfer trillions of dollars to medical professionals worried about their long-term futures. Their goal is to find more profitable ways to keep bodies alive for longer.
Needless to say, the most expensive bodies to keep alive are also the most decrepit. A typical dementia patient can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.
Those people who still have jobs will sacrifice one quarter of their future income to help others delay death by a few months or years. The tyranny of the mainstream is achieved with near-unanimous support.

In their wildest dreams, almost no one dares to resist spending non-existent fortunes to maintain incontinent zombies. Certain thoughts are forbidden. If they do think them, they certainly can't speak them.
The tax slavery and future debts that will never be repaid are the cost of 'doing the right thing'. Only a minuscule minority dares question the prevailing system.
The fact that some individuals in a persistent vegetative state are at least partially aware is also irrelevant. Being buried alive in their own bodies only means that more money should be spent on them to keep them alive even longer.

Doesn't all life have value?
No, it's often worthless. It can also be extremely bad. The human body is ridiculously unreliable and inefficient. It is, however, capable of generating an overwhelming amount of pain, the one thing it does exceedingly well. Anyone who has been denied painkillers for a kidney stone due to overwhelming bureaucracy can attest to this fact.

In every discussion about health care reform, the ultimate heresy is spending less money. Such talk is considered borderline criminal. Unlimited healthcare should be considered an essential right, unlike housing or food.
Healthcare ads propagate the illusion that we already live in a morally 'evolved' society that has transcended money concerns. Instead they show dancing seniors and family festivals without a financial care in the world.
These ads have been well paid for.

It is now possible for a person to appropriate millions of public dollars merely by giving birth, and perhaps to repeat the stunt as often as their biological clock allows. The cost of premature infant treatments and lifetime follow-up procedures far exceeds what most people could ever hope to earn.
Meanwhile, homeless persons are banned from buying cheap, mass-produced homes because it threatens powerful interest groups.

Are humans evil or just nuts?
Yes, but it goes deeper: ancient instincts are at work. They're unreliable but impossible to resist.
The real goal isn't to delay death, but to deny it altogether. It's about our greatest fears.
If the highest goal became to avoid pain, instead of extending life for its own sake, society would have to change rather drastically. This goal would however be much easier and cheaper to achieve than unlimited social healthcare for everyone.
Many people would be encouraged not to get pregnant, or to get abortions if they do. The world is already overpopulated, and childbirth and education have become insanely expensive. A large percentage of mankind could be paid to get sterilized.

Euthanasia would become more popular after more people became aware of the agonizing course of many diseases.
Passive infanticide is not only acceptable but often morally required, according to this columnist. This means the denial of extremely expensive medical procedures for malformed infants.
In our fantastically dysfunctional world, keeping an individual with a painful genetic disease alive for a lifetime of surgeries and full-time care could cost tens of millions of dollars that must be extracted by force. The vast sums involved automatically generate a much larger amount of hidden pain.
In fact the IRS has to imprison almost one tax violator for each such patient, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. The economic disruptions and delayed progress are much worse.

Simple solutions are often the best. What could be simpler than doing nothing? When the pain just won't stop, it's best to just give up. Do the opposite of what Mother Teresa would have recommended (she didn't believe in painkillers).

Ever-rising healthcare taxes affect all of society.
According to the Cato Institute, at least 10% of workers are underemployed because of needless government-mandated labor costs; from mindless bureaucracy to onerous regulations to trade barriers to required insurance (personally I think the percentage is higher).

Whether active or passive euthanasia is morally acceptable is a debate that can never be settled; not even the legal question.
The real debate is whether other people can be forced at gunpoint to contribute an immense portion of their income, time, and labor - in other words their lives - merely to keep other people alive.
Right now, it appears the answer to that question will always be yes. A tiny minority would like to opt out. They don't want the benefits of modern life-prolonging healthcare, and they don't want to pay for others to receive such benefits either.

Are they selfish? No, they may yet become the new heroes. Society is selfish.
If they are ever permitted to opt out, many other groups will want to do the same. The current social system wouldn't survive.
Many taxpayers would benefit, as would unconventional, excessively creative, sub-minority, and marginal individuals.

Needless to say, the world doesn't like simple solutions.

2/3/10-1/12 Arcalon Productions

and then came the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. 'Obamacare')

(USA item)
As medical technology continues to advance, previously incurable conditions are becoming somewhat more treatable.
However, these new procedures will require trillions of dollars in additional funding.
The costs are so high that this money can only be provided through healthcare reform.
There's just no other way. Even taxing the super-wealthy at 90% wouldn't be enough.

For example: imagine that you were to suffer from 'locked in syndrome'. The number of cases is set to explode as medicine becomes better at keeping people alive. In fact the current number of cases is already vastly underestimated, with thousands of sufferers being kept alive for decades without being able to move a muscle.

Able to feel, see, and hear everything around you, you will be completely unable to move.

Imagine how much it will cost to have your diapers changed three times a day, rolled onto your other side every few hours with pillows propped behind your back and between your legs, your eyelids temporarily taped shut to prevent infections.
A relative bargain at six grand per month!

Much more expensive will be all the tests, surgeries, and frequent nurse and doctors visits that you will 'need'.
After all, you won't be able to scream in unbearable agony from the rather frequent infections and bedsores.

This will cost more money than almost anyone can afford to pay!
Fortunately, thanks to healthcare reform, almost everyone will pay.

Because of all the fantastically expensive new procedures that will slightly delay death, total costs will be vastly higher than past outlays for Medicaid and Medicare.
Thanks to powerful lobbying groups, rent-seeking, and structural corruption, so-called Obamacare could but won't reduce the cost of many existing procedures.
Starting in 2014, everyone - especially younger people who don't feel they need it - will be forced to purchase health insurance.

In this way, trillions of dollars will be transferred to the health insurance corporations.
And all of this money will be spent - perhaps on you?

TWITTER
* BLOG *

Read the book that took a quarter century to plan and write.
More original scientific, sociological, and technical ideas than any science fiction novel ever published.
Secret source of the Anonymous meme.

Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon

Read chapters for free

4/11-1/12-6/23