A serious conversation about how we are going to cut health care costs...

I was under the impression that if your a 300lber, and kick off in your 40s- early 50s, it was cheaper long run than caring for a healthy person over their extended life span? If so, eat up ya'll. And pass the smokes!

BTW - how does social security withstand a constitutional challenge? It's confiscatory.

 

Been considering solar for sometime, but, yeah, seems to be more interesting, as you say, with cost and efficiencies improving. There's a place in Madison that actually specializes in solar electric and solar hot water. Had some emails with them in January, and I need to follow up.

 

Those too, are good points. I had not thought to add in the cost of insurance and taxes. Of course, as far as my knee is concerned, the better my knee feels, the better job it appears the Doctor did.

 

I don't know about that Dawn. I doubt that SS will ever go away in our lifetime. It would be a long transition, and would have to be phased in slowly. I think that's what Bush had in mind when he wanted to privatize SS to some extent. At least, that's the way I saw it. Start by letting the individual start investing part of his SS money into private instruments, and slowly increase that amount over a decade or more as more people came into the workforce.

Of course, there's the AARP. If Washington killed the SS system, the AARP would burn, and pillage, Congress within a couple of weeks. (They would burn, pillage, and rape Congress, except the desire just isn't there anymore.)

 

My wife and I built our log house out in the country about 30 years ago and considered installing our own wind charger system at that time except we didn't have the money then. It was going to cost about 5500 bucks and had a payoff time of about 7 years. I really screwed the pooch by not doing it then. Now the cost is about double. Rats.

 

I don't follow? I don't think that is scenario that repeats often.

My paternal grand parents lived to be 88. My grand dad, never made it to the hospital. My grandma, spent her last two weeks in the hospital before the clock stopped.

On my mom's side, my grandmother live to be 84 without much use of medical facility.

Good healthy living did not equate to more expensive costs in their cases.

BTW - My maternal grand dad was met an early end due to machine gun fire so it would have been hard to speculate.

I am not going to sit here and say that I am not afraid of death. I will unequivocally state that I am afraid, very afraid of growing old in absence of good health.

I would not want to live thinking that smoking or obesity may take me out in my prime or shortly thereafter. Just the thought of not dying and having to deal with the probable effect of either of these two, is reason good enough to not smoke and do my best every day to keep my weight in check.

In the end, I guess it come down to personal freedom. To some extent so should the cost, at the individual level. I do think that a maintenance program from an early start can aleviate total costs. But what do I know!

 

Dunno about you, but if I'm healthy, I'm not at the doctor.

 

I'll try a redirect...

Individuals can choose to smoke. A lot has been made of how they die younger than those that don't. Additionally, the claim has been that they "cost more money" to "health care" than non smokers. I think a month ago there was information showing that, yes, they died younger in many cases, but the cost of their final terminal care was shorter and sooner, thus, it was actually less expensive to have a smoker on board vs someone that might live to be older.

 

Until the odd one, or two, need a heart/lung transplant - could erase your profits on the rest that died young in a flash.

 

Well, if that is what the fact show, I don't have a problem.

I would speculate that health cost of a smoker that refuses to die young would also be higher if they did not die.

I think that there are other many other root causes that can bring cost up as one gets older however, to imply that healthy individuals incurr more in their life is not something that I can get onboard without discussing what constitutes healthy?

Maybe I have my grandparents to blame. Maybe they did not se the best example.

 

Well, non smokers need those too. And that's up to the insurance companies and their equations, isn't it?

 

It varies. My dad was pretty darn healthy, and then he was gone in a matter of a week at 72. They wanted to operate to go see what was inside, but he didn't want that and left hours before they did. He was pissed off at every IV that they put in him because someone was gonna have to pay for it.

My mom, non smoker, died at 60 after three years of fighting cancer. Being a nurse, she got some professional discounts and all, but it was still a big bill. My wife's grandfather died last year after years of lots of care with Alzeimers. I don't remember the exact costs that were picked up by Medicare, etc. but it was probably a whole lot of knees and all that went into caring for an otherwise healthy 94 year old man that had been retired for nearly thirty years.

 

SS was/is estimated to run out in 2041. This will be when Paul and I are in our early to mid 70's. They keep raising the age to be eligble for benefits. If it's there when we retire, great. If not, I am hoping to have enough cash and our living situation as such so that the lack of SS would not cause us to be dependent on others.

 

Continue care is a problem. it is an ethical issue that is hard to put in black and white. There are unfortunate events and not everyone gets the best plate to play with but there are sure some things that can be done to facilitate getting older in "style".

For me, I don't focus on cost when I think about growing old. I just want to make sure that if I am going to around, I can do so in a way that I can do.

This is personal decision. To each his own. I personally don't want to be responsible for paying for bad choices made by others but it is hard to be selective.

I admit that I don't have number to support how I feel but until the numbers arrive, I think the focus is all wrong, concentrating blame on obesity or smokers is a waste of time.

I would think that addressing or capping compensation and keeping lawyers out of the Medical system will show significantly greater result in lowering the existing costs.

I do however, have control of my emotions I chose towads individuals that have made choices, bad choices that have led to undesirable situations.

 

Keeping government out would also go a long way in lowering costs. There are a lot of lawyers that get involved in government. Go figure.

Now, as for "bad choices", that's sticky. The definition changes like a political landscape. Potentially all this food that's spiked with corn is a "bad choice". But the government's farm subsidy has moved that forward on so many fronts. "Bad choices" are often political anymore.

 

The poverty rate among seniors today is 1/8th of what it was before social security was enacted in the 1930's, so it's hard to argue it hasn't well served the purpose it was intended for. Due to this large benificial effect it will never be allowed to go insolvent. Just as it's worked for the last 70+ years it can remain solvent for the next century by 1. slightly raising the retirement age and tying it to life expectancy and 2. eliminating the exemption for the uber wealthy from paying thier fair share of payroll taxes that fund the program. Talking about privatization, elimination, or opt-out during times of such market instability is absurd. Republicans couldn't even get enough votes to pass similar ideas when they controlled all of DC when the Dow was over 12k. Elimination is never going to happen.

 

Newsflash. It *is* insolvent. All Ponzi schemes are.

It will never *fail* in newspeak because the printing press and the promissory notes will keep the balance in the black.

As far as the "uber-wealthy" paying their fair share, you are (I believe) proposing SS go from being a retiree & employer funded retirement program to a welfare program. Taxing the wealthy to fund the poor happens enough already. At least, as fucked up a concept as SS is, they were even-handed in their application in not leeching from high earners egregiously more than they would see in benefit from it.

 

Ah, so you believe that individuals are slaves to the masses then under the threat of government?

Right, a lot of Republicans are progressives that believe in government solving the "ills" of society just like Democrats. 100 years of it has only developed more and more and more government that strips people of their work and gives it to those that didn't work for it. How is that right?

 

Excellent planning.
During my working days I always listened to some of the retirement planners when they were saying what an individual needed to do for retirement. They all stated that a person needed to have an after retirement income equal to a minimum of 75% of their working income. Well, I have an after retirement income of 105% of my working income and it's not enough. I think maybe they forget that, after retirement, a person tends to play a little harder. That takes money. Dammit, I can't play as hard as I would like.

 

Curing SS ills seems to come up during every administration's tenure, and always seems to be pushed to the back burner. Ignore it and it'll go away, or so it seems. If I remember correctly, an economist from several years ago stated that if Congress had left SS alone, and not kept borrowing from it, it would have been in good shape for many decades to come.

What Congress kept doing was to "borrow" funds from the SS system, with the promise to repay it at a later date, then when a new budget came up, they would do away with the IOU's owed to SS, and calculate the new budget minus the IOU's. It's kind of like loaning money to someone and later they tell you that you're not going to get your money back. You're out the money plus the interest that it would have made. Incredible stupidity on the part of Congress' past and present.