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US Life Expectancy Declines For the First Time Since 1993 (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Washington Post: For the first time in more than two decades, life expectancy for Americans declined last year (Warning: may be paywalled; alternate source) -- a troubling development linked to a panoply of worsening health problems in the United States. Rising fatalities from heart disease and stroke, diabetes, drug overdoses, accidents and other conditions caused the lower life expectancy revealed in a report released Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics. In all, death rates rose for eight of the top 10 leading causes of death. The new report raises the possibility that major illnesses may be eroding prospects for an even wider group of Americans. Its findings show increases in "virtually every cause of death. It's all ages," said David Weir, director of the health and retirement study at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Over the past five years, he noted, improvements in death rates were among the smallest of the past four decades. "There's this just across-the-board [phenomenon] of not doing very well in the United States." Overall, life expectancy fell by one-tenth of a year, from 78.9 in 2014 to 78.8 in 2015, according to the latest data. The last time U.S. life expectancy at birth declined was in 1993, when it dropped from 75.6 to 75.4, according to World Bank data. The overall death rate rose 1.2 percent in 2015, its first uptick since 1999. More than 2.7 million people died, about 45 percent of them from heart disease or cancer.
On the bright side, the deaths due to depression due to overbearing election coverage will tail off.
Someone had to do it.
This kind of arbitrary date picking cause and effect game also works great with the economy! Try it at home, kids!
"Old man yells at systemd"
80 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks from 2004 to 2013. the US defense budget in 2015 was 637 billion dollars. However, The US Health and Human Services budget for 2015 is 1.3 trillion dollars. How is it we as a nation can outspend ourselves as the largest military power in the world, and still be faced with a declining life expectency rate?
Good people go to bed earlier.
Considering one of the major contributers is "unintentional injury deaths, such as overdoses and car accidents, increased by 6.7 percent" much of the blame likely sits on the pain pill problem. Cancer deaths actually went down, so health care is working for that disease. Alzheimers deaths rose a lot... but they say this is due to the medical establishment just recategorizing that as a cause of death... woner what those were usually listed under.
The ars article has some useful charts, if, unlike 3 out of 5 of trump supporters, you know how to read them.
Someone had to do it.
If other diseases don't get you, the depression will.
TFA links to some summaries, but some of the categories (particular deaths due to accidents) are aggravatingly unspecific. Alzheimer's and accidents (unintentional injuries) had the largest year-over-year increases, at +4.0 and +2.7 deaths per 100,000. The other causes were all +1.5 or less. The increase in these two exceeded the increases in all the other top-10 combined.
I'm really curious to see what the breakdown for unintentional injury deaths looks like for 2015. We're in the middle of a prescription painkiller addiction epidemic which is going largely unreported by the media. Two years ago, overdoses displaced motor vehicle accidents as the leading cause of accidental death - a position it had held for over a half century. This year we lost more famous people to overdoses than to gun violence, even though the media spent a vastly disproportionate amount of time focusing on the latter. The day of the UCLA shooting (1 murder, 1 suicide), there was a synthetic drug poisoning incident at a concert in Florida which killed 2 and sent 60 to the hospital. But the media concentrated almost entirely on the UCLA shooting.
Have you met the Vice President.
No ... googling ... Oh dear. This guy becomes president if Trump dies? No new election?
I wish the Donald a long and healthy life.
For the plebs, it's been dropping. Reason #2458 why raising the age for SS or Medicare is fascist BS.
It's a bright future.
If you handle snakes, speak in tongues, and still view women as chattel, yeah, Pence is your guy.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Linking to your own blog does not provide any support for the false narrative that you are pushing.
The question was not about the Sisters paying for abortions. It was about the Sisters filling in a form stating that they would not provide cover for abortions, so that the government could pay for those abortions.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The dumbest thing Americans do is assume that consumers act rationally, never-mind should be expected to act rationally. Health care is an insurance product that you want everyone to be forced to pay into so that they take the quickest path to getting back to contributing towards the GDP. None of this should be up to "consumers" in so far as somebody who needs health care gets to shop around if they're sick, blind, alone, or otherwise disadvanted in a miriad of other ways - nor providers, who shouldn't be looking at competition and profit margins for the kind of work they're in.
But I get it - you grew up with a hammer, and everything looks like a nail.
"Old man yells at systemd"
We did it without telling anyone. About half of all healthcare spending comes from Governments. Another 20% is from businesses, and that is overwhelmingly regulated and required by Governments (meaning - they aren't directly spending it but forcing it to be spent). So about 30% is left for consumers. Meaning - the vast majority of healthcare spending is driven by Government. That's a socialized system.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I would imagine Alzheimers deaths were categorized as "old age" or something similar. I think it's a relatively recent realization that while many people develop mental problems as they get older, this is not an absolute certainty and often there is a disease involved (so they blame the disease instead of just "that's the way people age").
Oh, also we might be getting better at looking after the various illnesses and problems that come more easily with Alzheimers, so that instead of dying of pneumonia / flu / breaking a hip (and the subsequent physical downward slide) / etc, people are living long enough with the disease that it gets to the truly critical systems (breathing and such), where it can be the primary cause of death instead of just an invitation for a different cause of death.
So what you're saying is, maybe I shouldn't be drinking the mercury that comes out of those old school thermometers, and playing with those discarded fire-alarms inside that off-limits shack with the peeling lead paint?
All you idiots blaming this tiny decrease on the ACA should look at what happened in Russia. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian system went from fully public to private, and life expectancy plummeted from numbers similar to those in most developed countries to 3rd world levels (i.e. as low as 50 years for men)! It was only after your hero Putin RE-SOCIALIZED the Russian medical system in the early 2000's that Russian life expectancy has crept back up into the 70s.
As big a fan I am of public health care I don't think you can attribute the changes in Russian mortality to their health care system.
The fall of the USSR was awful for Russia, they went from global superpower to a country that was literally falling apart. This created some really awful social issues that were probably a major cause for the increase in death rates.
Putin, aside from turning the nation into a kleptocracy, did restore a lot of social stability. That's probably the cause for their falling mortality rates.
I stole this Sig
Aging population is a problem here (EU) and some of the psot mentionned (mental degeneration like alzeihmer, accident) are stuff which happens more likely to old population. Looking at the median age , US population became older. Could it be simply the median age rising it finally "catch up" with the death toll (e.g. you have two factors going against each other, rising quality of care and rising median age, maybe we did not see the rising median age effect before because it was covered by rising quality of care ?). Median age in years
1960 29.5
1970 28.1
1980 30
1990 32.9
2000 35.3
2010 37.2
2015 37.8
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The problem is that there is no incentive for corporations to have people live healthy lives. As a result of this people are slowly being killed by the things they eat and the medicines they take. The obvious solution is to create feedback loops that discourage damaging profit motives.
For example, if you sell a product and a customer become ill as a result, your company has to contribute to their rehabilitation. This of course has the caveat of needing to record what people buy (already done by most companies) and relying on statistical analysis. As more and more data correlates a product to illness, the heavier the monetary burden is put on the corporation making it.
Corporation have already fubar'd a lot of people so the burden is going to be quite heavy for them for many years but if they correct the products they know are hurting people, it will decrease over time. If they decide, "fuck it, sell it anyway" then the monetary burden will increase until it drives them out of business.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Causes of death are often complex, especially in older people, who may be suffering from a variety of issues simultaneously. Nonetheless, one underlying cause should not be overlooked: increasing obesity in the US drives a lot of other health issues.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I can not even begin to tell you how dumb this idea is. Are you seriously going to haggle with the emergency staff, as they're about to treat your heart attack? What about when your s.o. finds a lump in their breasts/chest? What are you going to tell your kid, when they get lymphoma? "Sorry sweetie. You deserve the best, but we can only afford to send you to that guy that operates out of a dumpster." And what's the point of scrutinizing your medical bills when the medical insurance companies in your area are monopolies.
But of course! After eight years of Obama, life expectancy drops... and you already prepare to blame Trump!
In actual fact, one of the biggest contributors to lower life expectancy is obesity, and one of the biggest identifiable causes of obesity is government policy: corn subsidies and bad federal nutritional guidelines.
Theocracies are hell and are up there with fascist dictatorships and totalarian communism in the really really shit ways to run a country stakes.
Bright future, if goosestepping whilst clutching a bible , is your thing.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
It's sure to drop further once he repeals health care.
That's one rationalization of the future.
Another one is that life expectancy has gone down because more people are impoverished.
If you don't have a lot of money, you tend to scrimp and cut corners. You might not be able to purchase a new winter jacket, might not be able to take a day or two off of work when you're sick, and might not be able to recover from a burglary.
If the economy picks up in a way that benefits the people instead of businesses, more disposable cash might lead to longer life expectancy.
But hey - don't let me interfere with your narrative. The "and replace it with something better" thing will *never* **ever** happen.
Because... Trump.
That's great if you need aspirin, but what happens when you need major surgery or expensive long term treatment? Most people can't get hold of tens of thousands of dollars at short notice, especially when they sick.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Only 80 killed in 10 years, sounds like the defense was working for the most part.
The problem with healthcare is there is no ceiling to the cost and the end result is always the same, everyone dies eventually. Most of the early deaths appear to be lifestyle related anyway. Any reasonable person should prefer money to be spent on preventing unnecessary deaths (like terrorism) and just take care of themselves better to handle the longevity part.
The US now has 10 aircraft carriers, 2 under construction, and 1 planned. (source)
Military spending is 54% of our national budget, which is more than the amount of our deficit. More than the combined spending of the next seven countries.
What was that you were saying about spending ceilings?
Give people quality healthcare and they'll live longer.
The dumbest thing Americans do is assume that consumers act rationally, never-mind should be expected to act rationally.
Yes, people never make the choices *I* think they should make, so I want the government to *force* MY choices on everyone else with the threat of imprisonment or death to back it up.
Health care is an insurance product that you want everyone to be forced to pay into...
Ain't Fascism great?
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
The disturbing part is not the fact that longevity is in decline.
The disturbing part is the likelihood that it is by design.
Every government has a responsibility of resource management, and when a population continues to increase, policies and procedures must be put in place to help execute that responsibility.
If you take a look at our policies and legal products, it paints quite an alarming picture. Tobacco is a legal product. From a health perspective, it makes absolutely zero fucking sense, as it kills 450,000 Americans every year, while providing zero benefit for a human body.
That said, it is a legal product because it kills 450,000 Americans every year. It also is a leading cause of cancer, so government also gets the benefit of ticking off the "creates jobs" box with all of the related diseases caused by tobacco, namely the highly-profitable Cancer Industrial Complex. You really believe we're searching for a cure to eradicate an industry that generates well over $100 billion a year in profits, along with the twisted side benefit of population control? Think again.
And tobacco is but one example of resource management. Think marijuana is still considered "deadly" per DEA Schedule standards? Hardly. It's not legal because it's not deadly enough to benefit resource management. It also helps fund the War on Drugs, creates thousands of jobs in the DEA, and feeds the Privatized Prison Complex. The only downside is we've earned the illustrious moniker of The Incarcerated States of America, but clearly maintaining an illegal status is worth it.
Big Pharma has legalized the opium den in quite an elegant and profitable way, creating addicts, jobs, and deaths. And every study says HFCS is bad for you? Yup, let's ensure we put that shit in as many food products as possible while minimizing health risks. Carcinogens in makeup? Sure, why not. All examples of policy feeding the resource management responsibility.
TL; DR - Death is by design, backed by policy, because every government has a responsibility of resource management.
Excellent plan. So now when someone gets say cancer, unless they happen to have tens or possibly hundreds of thousands stashed away for cancer-day, they can either try to apply for a loan or go the way of walter white. Advanced health care is so expensive, there is no practical way for most people to pay it out of pocket and the demand is inelastic (people who have a serious condition requiring immediate care do not have the time or the capabilities to compare prices and go to the other side of the country to get their treatment slightly cheaper) which make market based solutions terribly inefficient at providing it cheaply.
Moreover, since the demand is fairly static there's no way of effectively competing in a market with existing hospitals. Take something as simple as X-rays for example: a given area will have a fairly constant demand for xrays that's directly tied to the size of the population, let's say 10 000 as an example. But the machines and the staff to run x-ray machines cost a lot. The price of a simple machine is around a million. If we assume a life-span of 10 years for the device, that factors down to roughly 10 dollars an image as the base cost (+ staff costs + margins for the hospital). If someone else buys a device to compete with the first one, they too will have to try and recoup their costs, which will drive the base-price of an image up in both hospitals, raising the costs overall. If demand is split evenly between both it means the base-cost will double.
The infrastructure to provide advanced medical care cost enormous amounts of money, which acts both as a barrier to entry to the market, as well as making sure that increasing competition will lower the general efficiency of a system once you start getting more capacity than you'd actually need to satisfy the needs of a given population.
Or, you could just do what most other developed economies have already done and institute direct controls on pricing. Just having a public option for insurance allowing the government to leverage its size and negotiate down prices would be a start. There's no justifiable reason for allowing companies to rake in gigantic profits on a life-saving service that pretty much everyone will need at some point in their life.
To this day, I've never understood why the richest country on the planet allows its citizens to be left to die or saddled with massive debt over medical issues when there are several existing models of providing first world level advanced care at a much cheaper cost per capita (in fact, every single existing medical system is cheaper than the US one)..
But that requires treating health care as a right of citizens, not as a commercial commodity, which goes against the divine mantra of 'the free market is the solution to everything' that seems to dominate american politicians' discussion on health as if the only way to keep people healthy is to sell them health.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Do you have a practical example of anywhere in the world where this works?? Because all west world countries that have working health care systems have the exact opposite of what you suggest. I live in Sweden with completely free health care. There's no $100 aspirin here.
The horrors do not end there.
If Air Force one crashes into the atlantic tomorrow with both Trump and Pence on board... the presidency goes to the speaker of the House. In this case Paul Ryan - a man who has run several times and was never able to get the nomination. He's saner than either the president- or vice-president elect but his own brand of ultra-selfcentered, classist asshole.
When he accepted the speakership it was only on condition of being allowed a minimum number of weeks a year to spend with his family - he is clearly in favor of the idea of family vacations... for rich people, because he also repeatedly fought and voted against making America NOT be one of the only countries on earth without protected, paid family leave.
Only in America is a couple of weeks a year to spend with your family, rest up a bit, get out of town a bit - without worrying about losing your job or lost wages NOT considered an essential right for a well-functioning society. Paul Ryan has gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that these things remain the privilege of the rich and wealthy - or at least those with rare enough job skills to be able to personally negotiate them contracts.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Oh it did, it's just that white folks ignored it or assumed it was justified. And they would've gotten away with it too if it hadn't been for those pesky cellphones.
But, you can't have poor people dying because they can't afford healthcare... and an individual cannot really negotiate with a large corporation - especially when the price for turning down their offer is to die.
So what can we do... mmm well we could pool a lot of people's money together. They could negotiate prices as a group - which can be on equal footing with the suppliers, and the group as a whole isn't "about to die" so the negotiations are no longer happening under duress. Then you can also use standard actuarial table structures to spread risk around so that those with little risk right now can help cover those with high risk - and get better results for all.
Of course, such systems work better the larger the pool - so you will want to get EVERYBODY in on it (that's a fundamental attribute of actuarial tables - they only WORK if they are BIG). Ideally - you want the pool to be available, in it's entirety, to pay for healthcare - so it should probably not be profit driven.
There was a system, very much like that, in Scottland in the 19th century - it was actually the first ever use of actuarial tables to spread risk, instituted by the Scottish church to help the wealthier congregations assist the poorer ones in their care duties.
But it doesn't seem ideal to have a religious organisation run this - after all, people don't all have the same religion and it would cause friction that would limit the pool of potential contributors.
Mmm we could set up a massive, non-religiously affiliated organisation to collect dues and manage the fund, handle the negotiations and take care of the payments when we need it !
Seems like a huge amount of effort to get set up and convince everybody to sign on though - and a bit of a chicken/egg problem since the greatest benefits (the negotiation power) only comes when you have lots of members, but to get lots of members you need to offer the benefits.
If only there was some organisation that was already established, had lots of negotiation power, the infrastructure to collect and manage dues with an already existing tiered-structure to scale your dues to your income, capacity to handle payments, no profit motive and no religious affiliation which we could leverage to run this national insurance scheme for us... I know we can use our government ! They're perfect ! This is EXACTLY the sort of thing we invented them for !
Oh wait, we just invented single payer healthcare.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
And this is different from forcing everyone to pay for the military how?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I didn't know the US had a left. I thought you had right-wingers and wacko right-wingers.
Ezekiel 23:20
Talk about willful ignorance, if there's only one hospital to go to then there's no competition. No competition means whatever price they want.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
If you handle snakes, speak in tongues, and still view women as chattel, yeah, Pence is your guy.
I didn't know he was an Islamist. Those are all very pro-muslim things to be doing.
Om, nomnomnom...
The horrors do not end there. If Air Force one crashes into the atlantic tomorrow with both Trump and Pence on board... the presidency goes to the speaker of the House.
The Vice President doesn't fly on Air Force One, he flies on Air Force Two. In fact, the President and Vice President don't spend much time together precisely for this reason.
Trump could piss in a jar, say "Drink my urine to absorb my business power" and his supporters would be lining up to buy it.
And when he gets sued after somebody discovered he stopped pissing in jars after the first one and the rest were just really expensive lemonade they'll call the judge biased against urolagnia.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Yeah I'm aware the standard versions are much cheaper, however this does not change the core of the argument: you cannot drive down cost by having several playes get expensive infrastructure for a service with a static demand while they all at the same time seek to make a profit on it.
I don't know about the US staff requirements, but in here radiological nurses go through around 4 years of training including physics having to do with radiation does calculations and so on. I'd say that's relatively highly trained. And again, even if you hire hobos from the street and pay them 5 $ an hour, this doesn't change the argument.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
More precisely, the Republicans in Congress will repeal the ACA. Their plan is to replace it with something else that keeps the provisions they like, such as coverage for prior conditions and keeping sproggs on their parents' plan until age 26.
The problem for them will be that insurance companies are not going to support keeping those provisions as an unfunded mandate. That means Congress will have to cover the bill. Problem there is that Congress would have raise taxes which they pledged to that moron Grover Norquist they would never do.
A bigger problem will be that insurance companies are in it for themselves, covering people is only something they must do to stay in business. Government pulling back from the ACA means they have their privates hanging out there and so will pull back their plans. Congress figures they have 2-3 years to replace the ACA after they vote to repeal it, but the insurance companies probably won't wait and will start canceling policies early.
The only fix is to find money elsewhere in the budget to keep the wheels on. That will be difficult since they also wish to increase defense spending AND supply the jack needed for a large public infrastructure program, which the U.S. does need. They claim they will find the money elsewhere. But they've already cut discretionary spending quite a bit. Going after mandatory spending means mixing it up with the blue hairs and AARP and would take years.
Congress figures that relaxing regulations and fixing the tax code will increase GDP to such an extent that tax receipts will go up. Yet their plans will decrease tax receipts. During the Kennedy administration when taxes were relatively high, cutting taxes would get a big bang for the buck. Now it will only supply a whimper. Decrease regulations is all wonderful except that ignoring regulation and not properly regulating led to the last recession. And companies are not complaining about regulation except polluting companies. Relaxing regs on them means increased costs for the resulting pollution.
If the Republicans are correct and 95% of climate scientists are in on the global warming scam, then a bit more pollution won't matter. However, if they are wrong, then there will be increasing costs (regardless of deregulation) for droughts, stronger storms, etc.
And then there is the Black Swans out there. One really big national disaster, say a big California earthquake, means their budget projections will be very wrong very fast.
the US does not have the worlds most advanced medicine.
nor does it have the best system.
the systems in place throughout Europe are not "demonstrably inferior".
our quality, outcomes, and life expectancy are all below average, while our costs are the highest in the world.
most of Europe enjoys better outcomes, better quality of care, and higher life expectancies, for between 1/3 to 1/2 the cost of comparable care in the US.
All you've done is prove you don't know what you're talking about, nor do you know the definitions of socialism or fascism.
Again.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
...while having a heart attack...
sure buddy.
sure.
keep telling yourself that.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
the fallacy here is in thinking that the health care industry hasn't been acting like a market.
IT HAS.
For decades.
And the result has been that the people who need the health care aren't the ones being served, not really, not in the classical economic sense, but rather its the insurance and provider industries that are. Because the simple fact is that when you are sick, you ARE NOT a rational actor in an ideal market.
If your doctor says you need this 300k$ surgery to survive, and then you need to take this $500 a pill medication every day for the rest of your life, or you will die...
you're not going to shop around. you're not going to say wait, hold on. you're gonna say "OK".
And they know this.
Prices are high simply because they can be.
Because market fetishists delude themselves into thinking it will sort itself out, even though all evidence says otherwise, and the majority of other nations have figured out that it IS indeed possible to reign in costs through the power of government. We (the USA) are the only self-deluded outlier in this subject.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Obama derangement syndrome was real, but Trump derangement is an order of magnitude worse. In 2008 Obama just had to deal with occasional rumors about his birthplace and whatever remnants of open white supremacy still exist in the 21st century, not a year-long media campaign with open, unabashed attempts to portray him as a literal fascist and the second coming of Hitler. Every president gets compared to Hitler of course, but usually by random nutjobs, not major MSM outlets.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/mainstream-media-scream-cnn-compares-trump-to-hitler-stalin/article/2604155
http://www.wnd.com/2016/10/5-washington-post-writers-liken-trump-to-hitler/
etc.
BTW that voice in your head right now saying "Well that's different, Trump really is Hitler"? That's the TDS talking.
Then of course there is the constant effort to label Trump and everyone associated with him with every "-ism" they can think of. Freaking Ben Carson is a white supremacist; Steve Bannon is a nazi because Breitbart supports confederate flags and Bannon may or may not have said something weakly anti-semitic in a private conversation 20+ years ago; Trump voters are all KKKers because one attention whore neonazi threw a rally attended by more reporters than people and declared himself king of the alt-right.
(Oh yeah, and then there's this thread blaming him for shit happening before he's even in office. And wasn't Obamacare specifically supposed to do the opposite of things like this?)
That proves your stupidity. Those are core values of all religions Abraham. That would be Jews Christians and Muslims all have the same core beliefs and foster a us versus them attitude.
Seriously Christians believe women should be fully covered though they replace burkas with bonnets.
Please actually look up your Christian beliefs some day. You might be depressed to know that woman rights are secondary to men. That slaves are allowed from neighboring countries and a few other things these are not just Islamist but fundamental beliefs of all religions of Abraham. Since they all share parts of the same book it makes sense. Yes the Koran and the Bible borrow and are heavily influenced by the Torah and other Jewish teachings.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
If Donald Trump can take credit for the improving economy over the past year, then he can also take credit for the declining health of the nation over the past year.
You are welcome on my lawn.
We just have to hope Trump et al go ballooning.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Our high end services are the best in the world. Not everyone can afford that, but it is available to some. People without money have a lower level of care. When you put those two groups together, it does average out to be less in some areas than other countries.
If your doctor says you need this 300k$ surgery to survive, and then you need to take this $500 a pill medication every day for the rest of your life, or you will die...
you're not going to shop around. you're not going to say wait, hold on. you're gonna say "OK".
Yes if someone else is writing the check you certainly will. If you had to pay out of pocket lots of people would say "I can't." At which point the medical providers are going to have to find a way to deliver for a lower cost if they want the work at all. They charge enough to basically wipe out the majority of their potential patients but no more. The problem is right now there is essentially no upper limit on what they can charge.
I would also argue that a lot of people might choose alternatives like 'make me comfortable as long as possible' at those prices. $300k I might find away to come up with but at say half a million I might decide it would be better to not bankrupt my family leave my wife and children with some of our aquired wealth and a hefty life insurance payout. I think a lot of people would
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The huge benefit of the US system, which is immaterial to most of us, is that you can cut inline if you have enough money. It doesn't matter how important you are, it just matters that your check clears.
Cheap storage VM.
You should read some history or foreign current affairs. Markets without food subsidies are chaotic with prices skyrocketing and plummeting based on crop yields. This drives farmers out of business and causes food to be unaffordable unpredictably.
There is a strong social benefit to giving farmers and consumers some price stability.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Cash pay (where individual people "write the check") is the highest cost healthcare area and has the worst healthcare outcomes. Insurance companies (where someone else is paying) negotiate lower rates and know the value of individual procedures. Your average Joe on the other hand has no idea and will pay many times what an insurance company will for the same procedure.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
Countries with For Profit healthcare ALWAYS have a lower life expectancy, and they always spend more per capita. Maximizing for profit means higher cost and worse results.
Subsidies only drive up prices if you don't impose cost controls, as ALL profitable businesses do. Eliminating health insurance will kill any poor person who gets seriously sick or injured, as they can't pay and can't borrow and hospitals won't treat for free. Desperate people do desperate things. If the choice is rob the rich or watch your kid die, most poor people will target the rich. If you want a stable country you must ensure the poor have just enough so they don't need to do that.