8 thoughts on “A Novel Solution To The Medicare Problem”
It’s unlikely that science solves any of the 7 basic areas of aging in the next 7 years, and I would expect our fascist overlords to implement the Stossell solution.
Being on the other side of 50 I’m doing all I can to stay healthy and active so I won’t be de facto euthanized.
Well, the thoroughly misses the moral point. There is no moral comparison between slavery and failing to spend enough on Medicare. In the one case, we made laws to support the ownership of one man by another. In the other, we are not making laws that forcibly extract money from the young to pay for the old. One is enslavement, the other is a form of socially-sanctioned Robin Hoodism.
I’m sorry, but I can’t get on board the we owe it to ’em Medicare bandwagon. I don’t think I “owe” any more to the older generation then they “owe” to me. They lent me money for college, but I paid them back with interest. They invented the computers that I use to do my work, but I invented the computer-based products that let them live more independently and economically when their strength gives out. And so on. Getting into a game of which generation owes which more is madness. No sensible and rational society would do it.
Furthermore, it’s all collectivist futility anyway. Even if I “owe” certain parts of the older generation — my actual parents and grandparents, for example, or my teachers, people who lent a hand — there are certainly other parts who have actually oppressed me, tried to keep me down, and I don’t owe those folks anything more than a kick in the teeth. It’s, again, madness, characteristically Marxist (i.e. stupid) madness, to try to put entire classes of people into moral relationship with each other, for example as moral debtor and creditor. We can only make those judgments, only be in those moral relationships, as individuals. Some children “owe” their parents big-time, because their parents were wonderful. But other children are “owed” by their parents, because their parents were awful. You can’t make useful generalizations.
I have little to say about his magical solution of eliminating aging, except to suggest we might as well eliminate bad luck while we’re at it, it seems no less implausible. Well, except that if he thinks eliminating aging would only solve problems, and not create a whole host of new problems, he hasn’t paid much attention to history.
Here’s just one: what will happen to political discourse when political leaders do not grow old, retire, die? What would our discourse today be like if Reagan was still around, hale and hearty, perfectly willing to serve another term? And FDR, too? What if Stalin had not been — could not be — removed by death, but only by invasion, war, insurrection, civil war?
People already mutter darkly about term limits, because they feel career politicians hang onto power too long. But at least you can count on the Great Term Limiter in the sky terming them out sooner or later. What happens when you can’t? What then? Will people still be somewhat graceful, waiting their turn, when there’s absolutely no guarantee their turn will ever come? Or will the struggle for power become far sharper, far more vicious, because there is no longer the Great Equalizer that limits the power and ascendancy of everyone?
I don’t mean to suggest by this that we shouldn’t work to extend our lives. But all significant change like that comes with new problems that can, sometimes, almost make it seem like the invention wasn’t worth it. Ask Dr. Oppenheimer.
Thanks for the link, Rand.
Carl —
Wow, what can I say? If I hadn’t repeatedly disclaimed saying anything in defense of Medicare, if I hadn’t made a point of saying that — of course — I’m not comparing Stossel to a murder or slaveholder, and if I had even once suggested that one generation “owes” something to another, I’d be feeling pretty sheepish right now.
Your points about politicians outliving their usefulness are interesting. A possible upside is that a very long-lived population would get even MORE sick of these people than we do now!
Robin Hood primarily stole from -the-government-. Tax collectors in particular.
One thing to be aware of in studying the health care debate is how close we are in the whole organ-cloning department.
It isn’t clear how much that will lengthen lifespans – but it make the amount of money we can blow in the last few years balloon at a ridiculous pace.
Phil, much of your conversation revolves around the ethical repugnance of “letting our seniors die” and the suggestion that the only historical reason not to have a massive intergenerational wealth-transfer program (like Medicare) was a plain lack of means, i.e. wealth. (Whereas others might argue it had something to do with a more robust sense of individual responsibility, id est you should save up for your own retirement, or a stronger culture of family, i.e. you should cultivate good relations with your adult children so they take care of you.)
If that isn’t a highly moral point of view, focussed on the ethics of the action of one generation towards another, I don’t know what is. You might as well have stuck in photos of frail grannies being pushed of the Bus O’ Life by young ruffians impatient to get their hands on her inheritance.
But of course I could have read you wrong. So, are you saying there is not a strong moral component of the decision to have, or not have, programs like Medicare? In other words, do you deny my suggestion that you see things that way, that Medicare is payment of an intergenerational moral debt?
I’m sure there are plenty of upsides to indefinite living. Who would doubt it? The question is: are they more or less than the downsides? If nothing else, observe that Mother Nature and Papa Evolution prescribed our alloted lifespan, fourscore and ten in captivity, somewhat less in the wild. That is not a matter of the machinery being incapable of better. A number of species built of DNA and proteins live longer, much longer, and far more live shorter, in most cases much shorter. Why do mayflies live a day, and rabbits three years, when they are made of the same stuff as us, who live a century, and Galapagos tortoises, who live two?
If you believe in evolution, this is no accident. There is some reason why three years is a pretty optimum lifespan for rabbits, and 200 for tortoises — and 100 for H. sapiens. There has been plenty of time over the past 2 million years for us to evolve longer lifespans, if that gave our species any advantage. Since we haven’t, it’s not a bad working hypothesis that it would be a disadvantage, that it causes more problems than it solves.
There’s no proof in that that Nature has found the global optimum. We are optimized to a primitive state of nature. Who’s to say that we cannot do better being longer-lived, now that we live in a civilized state, a situation where we can and do construct our surroundings? Not I.
And yet. Consider that we understand the social dynamics of our species so poorly that we cannot even agree on our basic form of governance, and have not succeeded in setting up an economic structure that isn’t subject to boom and bust cycles, and which doesn’t appear to pointlessly enrich some while cruelly impoverishing others. What are the chances that we would cope well with the far more disruptive change of indefinite lifespan? Not good.
That doesn’t mean I would oppose efforts to achieve it. Quite the contrary. I don’t worship equilibrium, the status quo. That’s just thanatos redefined. I think we should always go for it, reach for the stars, both as individuals and as a species. If we fail, we fail, we die, and we may die out as a species. But so what? To not try is to have never lived at all.
But I recommend not underestimating the size of the rocks in the road. Furthermore, you mentioned the children, and there is that in my concern. Dick Lamm once said that we have an obligation to die in our time, so that our children may come into their inheritance, both in terms of the resources of this world, but also in terms of their psychological and social development. More than one philosopher has suggested men only mature when their fathers die. To my mind, we definitely have strong moral obligations to our children, because we voluntarily bring them into this world. Do we have an obligation to turn the world over to them at some point? If we do not, have we cruelly imprisoned them, like buying a big dog when you live in a city apartment and putting the dog in a cage while you work long days downtown? Those are serious questions worth asking along the way.
Again, it’s not to say they don’t have answers. As I said, we could alter our surroundings. Maybe the young should routinely emigrate to new planets, taking them over and comining into their inheritance the way emigrants from overpopulated Europe came to American two centuries ago.
Or there’s the point that even if we did not die of natural causes, our average lifespan would not exceed a millenium, just due to accidents. That’s not all that much longer, really, if you take the long view. So maybe there’s not that big an issue anyway. It would depend on whether our brains are capable of rationally dealing with thousand-year lifespans.
Logan’s Run, The Sequel.
Carl —
>>Phil, much of your conversation revolves around the ethical repugnance of “letting our seniors die” and the suggestion that the only historical reason not to have a massive intergenerational wealth-transfer program (like Medicare) was a plain lack of means, i.e. wealth.
Nope.
Let’s not waste each others time. Either I’m a really poor writer or you are such an entrenched ideologue that you can only make out talking points that you want to argue with, irrespective of what you’re actually reading.
Either way, life’s too short.
Right now medicare patients are limited to doctors and hospitals in the United States where The high medical services continues to outstrip inflation year after year.
Allowing medicare patients to go abroad for medical care would go a long way to cutting cost Medicare costs and add more competition to reign in medical costs in the US.
Of course the AMA will do everything they can to oppose something like this
But some insurance companies and employers are starting to get on board and offer less expensive treatments abroad as part of a workers health insurance package.
Already hundreds of thousands of uninsured Americans are going abroad for medical treatments (Google “medical tourism”).
It’s time to let medicare patients do the same thing
It’s unlikely that science solves any of the 7 basic areas of aging in the next 7 years, and I would expect our fascist overlords to implement the Stossell solution.
Being on the other side of 50 I’m doing all I can to stay healthy and active so I won’t be de facto euthanized.
Well, the thoroughly misses the moral point. There is no moral comparison between slavery and failing to spend enough on Medicare. In the one case, we made laws to support the ownership of one man by another. In the other, we are not making laws that forcibly extract money from the young to pay for the old. One is enslavement, the other is a form of socially-sanctioned Robin Hoodism.
I’m sorry, but I can’t get on board the we owe it to ’em Medicare bandwagon. I don’t think I “owe” any more to the older generation then they “owe” to me. They lent me money for college, but I paid them back with interest. They invented the computers that I use to do my work, but I invented the computer-based products that let them live more independently and economically when their strength gives out. And so on. Getting into a game of which generation owes which more is madness. No sensible and rational society would do it.
Furthermore, it’s all collectivist futility anyway. Even if I “owe” certain parts of the older generation — my actual parents and grandparents, for example, or my teachers, people who lent a hand — there are certainly other parts who have actually oppressed me, tried to keep me down, and I don’t owe those folks anything more than a kick in the teeth. It’s, again, madness, characteristically Marxist (i.e. stupid) madness, to try to put entire classes of people into moral relationship with each other, for example as moral debtor and creditor. We can only make those judgments, only be in those moral relationships, as individuals. Some children “owe” their parents big-time, because their parents were wonderful. But other children are “owed” by their parents, because their parents were awful. You can’t make useful generalizations.
I have little to say about his magical solution of eliminating aging, except to suggest we might as well eliminate bad luck while we’re at it, it seems no less implausible. Well, except that if he thinks eliminating aging would only solve problems, and not create a whole host of new problems, he hasn’t paid much attention to history.
Here’s just one: what will happen to political discourse when political leaders do not grow old, retire, die? What would our discourse today be like if Reagan was still around, hale and hearty, perfectly willing to serve another term? And FDR, too? What if Stalin had not been — could not be — removed by death, but only by invasion, war, insurrection, civil war?
People already mutter darkly about term limits, because they feel career politicians hang onto power too long. But at least you can count on the Great Term Limiter in the sky terming them out sooner or later. What happens when you can’t? What then? Will people still be somewhat graceful, waiting their turn, when there’s absolutely no guarantee their turn will ever come? Or will the struggle for power become far sharper, far more vicious, because there is no longer the Great Equalizer that limits the power and ascendancy of everyone?
I don’t mean to suggest by this that we shouldn’t work to extend our lives. But all significant change like that comes with new problems that can, sometimes, almost make it seem like the invention wasn’t worth it. Ask Dr. Oppenheimer.
Thanks for the link, Rand.
Carl —
Wow, what can I say? If I hadn’t repeatedly disclaimed saying anything in defense of Medicare, if I hadn’t made a point of saying that — of course — I’m not comparing Stossel to a murder or slaveholder, and if I had even once suggested that one generation “owes” something to another, I’d be feeling pretty sheepish right now.
Your points about politicians outliving their usefulness are interesting. A possible upside is that a very long-lived population would get even MORE sick of these people than we do now!
Robin Hood primarily stole from -the-government-. Tax collectors in particular.
One thing to be aware of in studying the health care debate is how close we are in the whole organ-cloning department.
It isn’t clear how much that will lengthen lifespans – but it make the amount of money we can blow in the last few years balloon at a ridiculous pace.
Phil, much of your conversation revolves around the ethical repugnance of “letting our seniors die” and the suggestion that the only historical reason not to have a massive intergenerational wealth-transfer program (like Medicare) was a plain lack of means, i.e. wealth. (Whereas others might argue it had something to do with a more robust sense of individual responsibility, id est you should save up for your own retirement, or a stronger culture of family, i.e. you should cultivate good relations with your adult children so they take care of you.)
If that isn’t a highly moral point of view, focussed on the ethics of the action of one generation towards another, I don’t know what is. You might as well have stuck in photos of frail grannies being pushed of the Bus O’ Life by young ruffians impatient to get their hands on her inheritance.
But of course I could have read you wrong. So, are you saying there is not a strong moral component of the decision to have, or not have, programs like Medicare? In other words, do you deny my suggestion that you see things that way, that Medicare is payment of an intergenerational moral debt?
I’m sure there are plenty of upsides to indefinite living. Who would doubt it? The question is: are they more or less than the downsides? If nothing else, observe that Mother Nature and Papa Evolution prescribed our alloted lifespan, fourscore and ten in captivity, somewhat less in the wild. That is not a matter of the machinery being incapable of better. A number of species built of DNA and proteins live longer, much longer, and far more live shorter, in most cases much shorter. Why do mayflies live a day, and rabbits three years, when they are made of the same stuff as us, who live a century, and Galapagos tortoises, who live two?
If you believe in evolution, this is no accident. There is some reason why three years is a pretty optimum lifespan for rabbits, and 200 for tortoises — and 100 for H. sapiens. There has been plenty of time over the past 2 million years for us to evolve longer lifespans, if that gave our species any advantage. Since we haven’t, it’s not a bad working hypothesis that it would be a disadvantage, that it causes more problems than it solves.
There’s no proof in that that Nature has found the global optimum. We are optimized to a primitive state of nature. Who’s to say that we cannot do better being longer-lived, now that we live in a civilized state, a situation where we can and do construct our surroundings? Not I.
And yet. Consider that we understand the social dynamics of our species so poorly that we cannot even agree on our basic form of governance, and have not succeeded in setting up an economic structure that isn’t subject to boom and bust cycles, and which doesn’t appear to pointlessly enrich some while cruelly impoverishing others. What are the chances that we would cope well with the far more disruptive change of indefinite lifespan? Not good.
That doesn’t mean I would oppose efforts to achieve it. Quite the contrary. I don’t worship equilibrium, the status quo. That’s just thanatos redefined. I think we should always go for it, reach for the stars, both as individuals and as a species. If we fail, we fail, we die, and we may die out as a species. But so what? To not try is to have never lived at all.
But I recommend not underestimating the size of the rocks in the road. Furthermore, you mentioned the children, and there is that in my concern. Dick Lamm once said that we have an obligation to die in our time, so that our children may come into their inheritance, both in terms of the resources of this world, but also in terms of their psychological and social development. More than one philosopher has suggested men only mature when their fathers die. To my mind, we definitely have strong moral obligations to our children, because we voluntarily bring them into this world. Do we have an obligation to turn the world over to them at some point? If we do not, have we cruelly imprisoned them, like buying a big dog when you live in a city apartment and putting the dog in a cage while you work long days downtown? Those are serious questions worth asking along the way.
Again, it’s not to say they don’t have answers. As I said, we could alter our surroundings. Maybe the young should routinely emigrate to new planets, taking them over and comining into their inheritance the way emigrants from overpopulated Europe came to American two centuries ago.
Or there’s the point that even if we did not die of natural causes, our average lifespan would not exceed a millenium, just due to accidents. That’s not all that much longer, really, if you take the long view. So maybe there’s not that big an issue anyway. It would depend on whether our brains are capable of rationally dealing with thousand-year lifespans.
Logan’s Run, The Sequel.
Carl —
>>Phil, much of your conversation revolves around the ethical repugnance of “letting our seniors die” and the suggestion that the only historical reason not to have a massive intergenerational wealth-transfer program (like Medicare) was a plain lack of means, i.e. wealth.
Nope.
Let’s not waste each others time. Either I’m a really poor writer or you are such an entrenched ideologue that you can only make out talking points that you want to argue with, irrespective of what you’re actually reading.
Either way, life’s too short.
Right now medicare patients are limited to doctors and hospitals in the United States where The high medical services continues to outstrip inflation year after year.
Allowing medicare patients to go abroad for medical care would go a long way to cutting cost Medicare costs and add more competition to reign in medical costs in the US.
Of course the AMA will do everything they can to oppose something like this
But some insurance companies and employers are starting to get on board and offer less expensive treatments abroad as part of a workers health insurance package.
Already hundreds of thousands of uninsured Americans are going abroad for medical treatments (Google “medical tourism”).
It’s time to let medicare patients do the same thing