Then I think I'll just stay in San Francisco where I can get universal health care (provided my income is less than 52k if I'm single). Yeah, it's called Healthy San Francisco.
More like Bankrupt San Francisco. You guys were half a billion in the hole last year, nearly half of your total discretionary spending. Your two year old program is sitting on a shrinking tax base with expanding costs. Those aren't the right directions to be going. You'd be in the same condition the federal budget is in if it weren't for that pesky requirement that they balance it.
The relevancy is that not always is ones impact on society apparent during their lifetime, and In my hypothetical scenario the impact would have out weighed the cost. surely I figured you would have been able to gleen a bit of the meaning without having to pick it appart.
Irrelevant. This has dick to do with medicare. Medicare is for old people. Old retired people. The only fiscal impacts to be made are in the wrong direction.
Ignoring medicare, still utterly irrelevant. The hundreds of millions of dollars a year or whatever it is that we spend saving cancer patients under the age of 20 could have funded the educations of millions of college students every year. It could fund high quality monitoring so our absurd foster care system we shouldn't even have isn't breeding criminals. It could be loaned out as venture capital with a near inflation rate of return to spur enterprenureship. Pissing away money for the hope of a gain that will never outwiegh the cost is stupid. For every Gates, there are millions who would be a debt to society. You cannot justify spending massive amounts of money by pointing to inconsequential gains. It is purely a charitable act when you spend millions on someone that can't pay their own costs.
Also your saying they spent over 1.2 million to beat it? on average the typical highschool graduate earns 1.2 mil over their life time.. so either many of your family never graduated atleast highschool muchless college, or the treatments were in excess of 1.2 mil on up depending on how many children he had.
You've under-estimated his costs. There's surviving cancer, and barely surviving cancer on multiple occasions.
Multiple recurrences of lymphoma, all of them caught late because it mimics pneumonia, misdiagnosed limes disease(caused the lymphoma), irregular heart beat, multiple strokes, diabetes, low blood pressure, the list goes on. Combine all of those with the side effects and drug interaction problems and you've got a guy that blew a hundred thousand a year without even trying. He may have broke that every month for the first couple years. We expected him to die every time he got tagged with it, the dumb shit doctors down here do one hell of a bang up job spotting his variant. He was in the late stages with weeks to live every bloody time they started treatments. I remember getting told he was dying the first time he got hit with it, they didn't say anything till they were sure he wasn't getting better, and then it was months more before he started improving. All together, he spent months of his life in intensive care, months more hospitalized in general, and years of cancer treatments besides that, every bit government funded.
As far as his children goes, one of them died around 20, one of them has been on full disability since his mid 20's because of a particularly bad case of crones(he's an even bigger net loss if he lives long enough), the other two aren't finished making money. Part time occasionally working house wives aren't real big contributors to the money pool, so one kid is all he's got to make it up. He isn't finished working yet, but he sure as hell hasn't made the millions that got burned by my grandfather even if we don't subtract for uncle crones. Assuming he works till he drops, which is currently his plan, maybe we'll get close to breaking even, but I'd have to go tally the costs up to be sure, but rifling through several hundred bills isn't my idea of fun. More likely he'll kick the bucket via stress related heart attack and my uncle will take us further into the negative. Never mind that medicare contributions are a small fraction of income.
My family's contribution to society is a huge gaping hole in your wallet where money used to be. That and my acid tongue.
