Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Since women are only in marriage for the money, I would say it's time to quit once the husband is too weak to change his will.
Your life is worth your salary. If you don't like it, perhaps you should take it up with your boss?
If the person is over 45 and statistics say that there is a high probability they will suck up health care someone else would do better getting don't let the insurance company pay for it. Instead only allow them to offer hospice or a Dr. K Klinic visit and a nice state paid funeral.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Taxpayer bankrolled (what some call, "free") healthcare means never having to decide when spending the money isn't worth the value anymore. Spend millions on the last week of life? NO problem! Everybody -else- will pay for it, and you can still pass on your financial portfolio to your kids! Win win! Well, except for all the people paying. They're losing.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
3 months after your death, she will have a greasy guido, paid with your money bangig her.
He then proceeds to drive your lamborghini carelessly while on coke and destroys it, simultaneously putting your dear wife into a wheelchair.
Get the bloody liver and drink it again if you can afford it.
A friend of mine who read the Obama bill said they DEFINITELY had tiered levels of coverage by age - older people won't get the same level of care. I guess that's one way to keep health care costs down - don't give it to people!
It's TOTALLY worth $600K to stay alive two more years. What the fuck kind of moron thinks otherwise? If you want to off your own self, go ahead. But me personally, I have a billion years to be dead, and I have made it clear that I want all extraordinary measures taken. I want to be a huge financial and emotional burden, a brain in a jar connected to wires, just wheel me out of the closet every year and say hey.
Because whether or not that's better than being dead, it really doesn't change the amount of time I have to be dead, and in my world being on this planet is a pretty damn good thing. Dignity be damned.
So stop with the Joseph Mengele type "praticalities"...
i get it. just because they're a close relative to someone we should be willing to spend whatever it takes to extend their lives by a few months. everyone is someone's close relative. everyone dies without exception.
spending hundreds of thousands of your own dollars to keep someone you deeply care about alive? i'm all for it. using the government to force me to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to keep alive thousands of people i don't even know? fuck you all.
What Americans and right wingers don't get, is that some people prefer a humane society...
There's no such thing. You're simply paying for your "humane society" by enslaving others. You satisfy your conscious by only enslaving the most productive and telling yourself it's for the good of society.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Don't worry about that, every European government would have let that guy die in the first year of treatment.
You get what you pay for. Except you pay more, and get less. Furthermore, you have zero choice in the matter.