Death and Budgets - NYTimes.com
A large share of our health care spending is devoted to ill patients in the last phases of life. This sort of spending is growing fast. Americans spent $91 billion caring for Alzheimer’s patients in 2005. By 2015, according to Callahan and Nuland, the cost of Alzheimer’s will rise to $189 billion and by 2050 it is projected to rise to $1 trillion annually — double what Medicare costs right now.
If the government had really been interested in public cost it would have encouraged smoking, not discouraged it. It would not only have saved money in the long run—smokers die sooner and spend less time on Medicare—it would also have saved our friend David Brooks here—OK, surely he is somebody's friend—from making today's sermonette: Just shut up and die.
My only point today is that we think the budget mess is a squabble between partisans in Washington. But in large measure it’s about our inability to face death and our willingness as a nation to spend whatever it takes to push it just slightly over the horizon.
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