Healthcare Rationing Debate

Not everyone dies. A lot are unnecessarily burdening the medical system while paying no out of pocket costs.

Saying yes to one person's expensive treatment is saying no to 4 people's cheap treatment.

Perhaps the problem is more that there exists expensive treatments. As long as they exist, people will be upset at not getting them. When they don't exist, people won't blame anyone for their death. Imagine if some miracle cancer cure is discovered but it genuinely costs a million dollars (not just due to patents). There'll be no option but to let uninsured poor people die. There might not be enough money in the country to actually save them all.

You're not really helping anyone if you die because you can't afford medicine.

How many people simply wouldn't be able to afford that and thus die?Wouldn't it be better to have them cured and live longer and just spend their money on curing other illnesses we're all going to have anyway?There is something about this cynic explanation that just doesn't sound right to me

could the money spent keeping alive be better used elsewhere?

Reduce what happening? Dying? I'm pretty sure the death rate will remain 100% even if you were willing to spend $1B to "prevent" it. Everyone dies.I'm not saying that the guy should die instead of using other people's money to postpone death. I'm saying that he has no more right to that money than those other people do. You're talking as if there is an infinite amount of money to be spent on this one person. But spending money on this guy takes it away from other people. The wor

Because 0.15% is not a life-saving treatment but hoping for a miracle. And when people are immensely suffering they actually prefer to die than prolonging the sufferings.How could not money pay part in this? If the continued care costs, let's say $10,000/month (not unusual for the US) and you have 1:1000 chance to live that month, it means this month has cost $10 million dollars. Who is going to pay for that? In fact, taking all this money for yourself, the healthcare for other peop

This is somewhat of a straw man fallacy often cited by proponents of profit centric healthcare. In reality it happens relatively rarely and is usually linked to the effectiveness of that treatment. In the UK, a typical example of state provided healthcare, some extremely expensive treatments which can only increase life expectancy for a few weeks or months are not approved as there is little benefit. But not every health insurance policy in the US will cover this treatment, especially without so

I'm sure they're talking about necessary healthcare - e.g., cancer drugs, insulin, dialysis, heart surgery, etc.When giving the option of parting ways with some more money or dying, virtually no one is going to choose the latter.Unfortunately, the US healthcare system is set up to extract maximum capital from people who interact with it. Worse: it's not alone. For example, the reason food in the US has so much sugar, salt, and fat in it is that the food industry has carefu