The Creepy Part of the Health Insurance Issue

I am going to discuss today an example of an actual person and their health case, although I'm changing the name and an irrelevant fact or two.  What I have to stress is that this is not about that person, or her situation, as much as the extent to which she is representative of a larger issue.  There are lots of "Marys" around, and the fact that there are is the real topic.

Mary is not her real name, of course.  She is about 70, and a sort of "relative by marriage and then by marriage", so I know her somewhat.  She lives with her widowed sister, and has a room in the sister's house -- when she is not in a hospital.

Mary is, for all intents and purposes, dying, and there is no point waffling that fact.  She has suffered all her life from Crohn's disease, a chronic intestinal disorder, and a life of smoking (which she still does, when not in the hospital), has severely weakened her heart and lungs.  And she has severely damaged kidneys, which are in turn weakening all her vital organs in a downward spiral.

Again -- this is not about her, but the facts are somewhat relevant.

Her life consists of a series of health crises, when her vital signs go sufficiently out of whack to where she faints or otherwise needs to be hospitalized.  She will be there for 7-10 days until the doctors can stabilize her, after which she comes home to her sister's house ... until the next crisis, a week or so later.  A week in the hospital, ten days home -- the cycle simply repeats.

Mary is on Medicare, supplemented by a pension-based Medicare supplement, so the part she pays is mostly covered.  But that doesn't mean her care is free.

All those trips to the hospital, sometimes in an ambulance, all those weeks in the hospital, the care there, the doctors checking in -- all of that costs money, and the hospital charges are paid, in Mary's case, by the insurance company.  Medicare has truly no options here; her illnesses are quite real and common, so her treatment is normal and necessary.  They do not challenge the necessity of the treatment, as none of it is out of the ordinary.

The bills that Medicare pays, however, are gargantuan.  I don't have to throw numbers at you even if I knew them, which I don't; clearly a week in the hospital is tens of thousands of dollars, and someone is paying -- in her case, the taxpayer (through Medicare) and the supplemental insurance company for a modest percentage of it.

The point I want to make here is that Mary is dying.  I have a little medical background, enough to be dangerous, and I would expect that with the kidney failure going on, the secondary impact on other organs (particularly her smoke-damaged lungs and heart) will lead to death in less than a year.

In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of dollars will be paid out by Medicare to sustain someone who has little quality of life, and no prospect for that improving in her remaining time.  Taxpayers will pay taxes, which fund Medicare, which pays the hospital, which pays the medical staff and suppliers of the drugs and consumables, who pay their employees and suppliers.  Lots of transactions result from her care.

There are literally thousands of Marys in the USA as I write this.  Our national morality is a Judeo-Christian one, that we will make no moral decision on the quality of their life, and we will (through Medicare) continue to pay for sustaining treatment, rather than withholding it, until the patient or the family stop medical treatment and revert to palliative care.

I agree, as a Christian, an American and a human being.  There is no alternative for us.  People die, and for the most part it is a slow process requiring more care as it progresses.

But this is what the Obamacare people broke the seal on when they raised the issue of "death panels" (and quickly retreated) and apportioning care.  Health care as practiced in the USA is expensive, driven up by a tort-insurance crisis no one will touch, and it is not appreciably cheaper in the civilized world for the same level of care.

The leaking of the death-panel narrative tells us that the more socialist nations of the otherwise-free world -- Canada, the Scandinavian nations -- are having to look at actually deciding who gets care and who doesn't.  If it isn't pretty now, it surely is going to get uglier soon, at least when the word gets out.

There are many, many Marys in the USA right now, and the cost of sustaining them is astronomical.  Our Christian generosity and morality has a price.  What it may come to is that the USA distinguishes ourselves from the socialists, in that we remain willing to share the costs of that care and not withhold it -- or even discuss withholding it.  And we will not turn that decision over to unelected people.

In that, we will be a purer, if poorer, place.

Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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