I'd say, that, that is what people who are concerned about health care costs should say in general.

OK, but you see my point, right?

Well, WTF? Isn't that what fically responsible conservatives say should have to happen?

I'd say, that, that is what people who are concerned about health care costs should say in general. We will allocate fewer resources to health care and thus, more people will die. Whether we do it via government fiat, letting things go on as they have and simply running out of said resources, or using the market....resources will eventually be reduced and people who otherwise would have gotten care wont. It isn't a matter of if or possibly, its simply a matter of when, IMO.

Grewgills,

Nope haven't looked at the paper itself yet, but they usually cost only $5 from NBER for a pdf version.

You The problem is as you...

Sorry...

Sam and Bit - And this is of course one of the intractable problems. We as a society have not come to grips with letting Grandma go. We want those last 3 months, gruesome as they might be. As expensive as they might be.

You know, I'm really trying to figure out what the right-wing take on all this is (and I'm not singling you out, Drew). You problem is as you (and I in an earlier thread) present it in the above. And yet, when someone acknowledges the problem, at least at the state level, and proposes action that, I assume, is the conservative solution, that is to say, the "financially realistic" solution, he gets this from a leading conservative blogger:

It is cruel to be kind.

Via the Mercury News, the cuts include eliminating welfare for 521,000 working families is gone. The checks averaged $526 a month. That saves $3.3 billion a year.

And the newspaper reported, “Medi-Cal coverage for dialysis and for breast and cervical cancer treatment for those over age 65 would be cut. Undocumented immigrants would lose non-emergency health care.”

There is your first taste of Obamacare. To save money, grandma will die of cancer.

Well, WTF? Isn't that what fically responsible conservatives say should have to happen? Isn't that the correct, prudent thing to do? And yet, Surber uses it as a club to pound Obama. Since he's widely read, I fully expect this to be picked up and spread throughout the right-wing blogosphere: Obamacare=grandmacide. I mean, W-T-F?

Sam and Bit - And this is of course one of the intractable problems. We as a society have not come to grips with letting Grandma go. We want those last 3 months, gruesome as they might be. As expensive as they might be. And let that newborn go? Unthinkable.

Before you get too far down that road, consider that that sort of mentality is precisely why our life expectancy has been going steadily up over the years.

What point do you think I'm making with my post cause I'm not sure you got it?

I guarantee any assessment of health care costs will show wickedly disproportionate expenditures in the first and last six months of life.

Well, from my experience, working in a "hospital" for the aged and dying, the money spent didn't seem "wickedly disporportionate." The care provided was adequate, and that's about all you could say for it. The place was basically a warehouse for the elderly on their way to death. For as long as I was there, I can only recall two, maybe three patients that left the hospital alive...and that was to go to another hospital. (It was something, I can tell you, to come in on a Monday morning after a weekend off, to find that seven patients on your wing--out of 20--had died over that weekend from a pulmonary virus that was running through the place.) It was only one hospital owned by a chain of such hospitals. I've no reason to believe that the others were any different. Now that I'm coming up on my seventh decade, I find myself thinking about what the chief nurse said to us in training: We all get to where these folks are.

If they make an error, let's identify it, rather than making any random insults.

Spencer, I think they are just trying to say the numbers lots of different ways. I thought this was interesting:

In 2006, 70% of health care spending in Canada was financed by government, versus 46% in the United States.

We do tend to think that "almost 100" percent of their care comes from the government, but apparently it isn't true.

I agree that the "83%" line is kind of pointless, once they've already talked per-capita and per-GDP.

is talking about a different ratio than the rest of the paragraph.

In the US the govt accounts for under half of health care expenditure as compared to nearly 100% in Canada.
This particular quote compares govt in US -- under half of spending -- to total spending in Canada.

It is a poorly constructed paragraph to suddenly change what they are comparing.

But tell me, what do we pay to finance those longer survival rates. Just give me a simple data point, like millions of dollars per month of longer survival

Wiki? Wiki?

Please.

That seems a simple enough datum.