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Lessons of a $618,616 Death
theodp writes "Two years after her husband's death, Amanda Bennett examines the costs and complex questions of keeping one man alive. The bills for his seven-year battle with cancer totaled $618,616, almost two-thirds of which was for his final 24 months. No one can say for sure if the treatments helped extend his life, and she's left with a question she still can't answer: When is it time to quit?"
Though it may not have done much for him, the same treatments may have better results on others on average, and therefore be worth it. Or maybe not. Also, medical bills tend to be grossly inflated, so the real cost may have only been something like $150,000. It's a quadruple the price and give the insurance company 75% off scam (but still charge the cash customer the over inflated price, partly to make up for cash customers who don't pay).
There is a HUGE amount of overhead in US health care starting with a massive markup on medicine which isn't seen elsewhere and ending with the support of a lot of middlemen.
It doesn't matter if it's private or public - what matters is removing the leeches and profiteers from the system and turning it back into medicine instead of a protection racket pretending to be insurance and hospitals where care is an afterthought. The doctors are not the ones getting rich and if you want to see a nurse laugh ask them if they are rich.
I doubt that the same amount of care elsewhere with the same treatments under a public system would have cost the taxpayer anywhere near one fifth of that. Remember folks, it's still a drain on the economy even if rich sick people are the ones getting ripped off instead of the taxpayer - it still hurts everyone to an extent.
You should _not even have to_ ask yourself this question - healthcare should never put such responsibility into an affected person's hand!
The US seriously needs to fix its healthcare system.
``Your life is worth your salary.''
Actually, my life is worth a lot more than that. The boss only pays for what I give him, but there is a lot more I do in life.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Where I live, we have a saying among the population:
"You can afford to die, you cannot afford to fall sick."
After glancing at the article, I can't stand to read it. I don't think I can hold back my tears. So, no RTFA for me.
In fairness, the fact that someone can crack a "your mum" joke in this discussion scares me a lot less than some of the other posts here that suggest "your life = your salary."
The truth is your life is worth more than your salary. For starters, even if you only wanted to focus on money, it's not just your salary that matters but your potential future salary. However this thinking is still severely flawed, humans do a lot of activities that aren't costed. They care for people, fall in love, contribute to the cultural and political life of society, write open source software, complete volunteer work and provide social engagement for others.
We should never underestimate the value of surviving, surviving is what humans do, everything else (including sex) is just a footnote.
Yes, this is a problem with any sort of expensive care, especially the long-term kind.
Yes, that's always important.
I'm going to have to go with no. In the end, it is not your position, my position, or the loved one's position to choose how or if a patient should continue treatment. It is the patient who will have to live with the consequences of their choices and to take away those choices with a mantra that one must "keep on trying" regardless of the futility of the action condemns people to situations where they are forced to endure needless suffering to placate the wishes of others. If it is wrong to coerce or steer people to give up, it is certainly as wrong to coerce or steer people to keep on trying.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
If you're really pissed about this, then you haven't really thought it through.
Natural resources are finite. The supply of human labor is finite. It is impossible to expend infinite amounts of resources extending human life. You've been lied to if you believe you don't have to care about these truths. And if your government is the one who has told you this lie, that just means that they will take on the responsibility of reconciling any disconnect between your perception and reality, by force, whenever necessary.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
It is a sad day when one decides to value the dollar worth of a human life.
It is indeed sad, but life is sad that way. If you don't think about the dollar worth, more human lives are lost. As she said in the article, the deceased himself, had he known the costs of his care could be used to vaccinate a tremendous amount of third-world children - he would have preferred the money be spent that way.
It's important to realize, as you do, that human life is not equal to any monetary amount. But it's also important to realize that we have a limited amount of resources, and we need to think about how to utilize them, to have the best possible effect on people, including saving their lives. That includes calculating how much it costs to keep a person alive.
Being happy is a small and IMHO sometimes a petty or selfish reason. I AM dying from liver failure. I do not want to have a transplant or go through the expenses. I don't want my wife to struggle through the remainder of her life because I love her too much to see her suffer by being poor again.
I'm very happy even with everything that is happening to me. I'd rather live a good life of quality than a long one without.
Ok, time to sacrifice some karma I guess...
You suggest that the desires of the patient are the ONLY thing that should be considered when deciding on treatment plans.
However, there are others who have a legitimate stake in the matter. In particular is whoever is paying for it.
Suppose that for a cost of one billion dollars I could extend somebody's life for one year, completely devoid of any pain or suffering. It would be a very fulfilling year, one that anybody would want to live.
Who wouldn't want that? One more year with their family, one more year to accomplish whatever it is that makes somebody feel happy about living. If left up only to the recipient of such care, everybody would elect to have this treatment.
However, at a cost of one billion dollars each the entire human race would essentially be enslaved to providing for the care of maybe a few thousand or tens of thousands of people who manage to receive the treatment before the entire planet runs out of resources.
Obviously a billion dollars is a contrived example. The opposite contrived example would be ten dollars - I think virtually everybody could agree that for taxpayers to balk at spending ten dollars to extend somebody's life for a year sounds very stingy (although one could debate that we do this all the time when we ignore starving people in poor nations).
So, at this point we're just haggling over price. At what point do those actually paying for care get to say "enough is enough?" That is exactly what this article is about. Talking about putting a price on life sounds barbaric, but the fact is that everybody does this every day - they just don't talk about it.
Here is something else to think about - if you really do consider my life to be worth a million dollars per year, or whatever, can I elect just to receive the cash for two years of life right now and then thirty years from now you can just let me die in peace?
People need to talk about this, and we need to reach a consensus to where the line is.
Actually, first we need to agree that there is, and has to be, a line!
No health care setup can be fully funded, whether private or public, as there will always come a time when someone needs something new and leading edge and they tend to be expensive. Not that money can always be thrown at the problem - I remember feeling particularly sorry for Paul McCartney when Linda died because I think I would have been looking for any and all treatments regardless of cost ... and yet she died!
So assuming we can agree that any health system has a budget we need people to administer that budget and that involves wieghing up the relative merits of treatment A for one (very sick) person vs treatment B for several (not so sick) people: eg Heart Swap vs Hip Replacement.
The people making those decisions HAVE to be cold and calculating about it. This means none of the (now normal!) "how does it feel" style reporting we're now too often saddled with by lazy reporters. The argument of "what if it was your father" is a ridiculous argument - of course you want the best for you and yours but that isn't necessarily the best for 'society' - in much the same way with kidnapping/hostages. As an individual I would say pay them what they ask for to buy my freedom, but as part of 'society' I would say you should NOT pay for my release because I recognise that paying them off encourages more kidnappings!
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
It is hope. People hope to see their relative healthy again. They remember seeing a person healthy. They miss it, and they want to see it again.
Unfortunately, some of the treatments are ineffective. They might extend life, but they will never restore health. Medical procedures are graded by mortality rate over periods of time. Ex: 50% survival at 5 years. The goal needs to be different. Effectiveness should be judged by time outside the hospital without extensive medical intervention. 50% of the time, this procedure gets you 3 more years with your family. A subtle and significant improvement.
You do realize that in your country, somebody asks this question too. Assuming you live in a country with a single payer system, the people who run your single payer system have already decided what they are willing to pay and for which procedures. The way they do that is generally looking at dollars spent vs. quality-adjusted-life-years purchased for their taxpayer citizens, and similar health economics measures. I agree that the system in the US is fucked up in many many ways, but having to consider costs in medical treatment is a reality of finite resources and it happens everywhere.