At this particular moment in time they are extra odious for sure. It used to be living long enough to be old took real skill… now there are a LOT of stupid old people. It turns out ‘the wisdom of the elderly’ was 100% survivorship bias.
My deceased grandfather, born in the 20’s, was legit wise. When I went to visit he was always reading books. Replace ‘reading books’ with ‘watching Fox’ for an entire generation that never had to be good at anything and you get this stupid shit we have now.
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“My healthcare is free now. Fuck everyone else.”
– Nursing Home Resident, circa 2019
I’m obviously sympathetic to the larger point, but if this guy stopped taking his meds because of 20 dollars that sounds a lot like a conscious decision. Like If he didn’t qualify for Medicaid he had 20 bucks, right?
I’m okay with death panels for people like her.
Yeah I’m definitely for a healthcare system with a budget… that has a mandate to increase life expectancy to the highest level it can get to inside that budget.
That system probably won’t spend 50k to give some 75 year old an extra 90 days of suffering at the end of their life and I’m fine with that.
A lot of this stuff is cultural - Asians ESPECIALLY drag out the dying process to the point that I feel that I’m torturing a nearly dead body. Hispanics do the same thing fairly frequently. I have the gestalt that the more education you have the more likely you are to have a POLST/DNR-DNI set up for end of life care, but I don’t know if that is true or not.
And some 75 year olds are 50, and some are 90, if that makes sense. So this stuff is complicated.
MM MD
I’ll bow to your experience on the matter obviously. At the same time we very definitely ARE spending waaay more money than is sustainable on healthcare. I’d be curious where you think the waste is. (I was going to type ‘where the waste is hiding’ but there’s objectively too much of it for it to be hard to perceive lol)
That’s because minorities who are more likely to be liberal don’t reach that age.
And I think that makes deplorables happy.
Sometimes waste is in the eye of the beholder. But drug prices would be a good place to begin. I’ve said before you’ll know we’re serious about getting a handle on costs when Medicare is allowed to negotiate with Big Pharm on drug prices. Also, Medicare pretty much wags the dog on health care - watching it is a lot easier than trying to parse out individual insurance companies.
And the ginormous gorilla in the room is care for dementia. The number of patients requiring it is going no where but up, and I’d guess less than 5% of people have any sort of coverage for it.
MM MD
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I think my entire family on my Mom’s side is going to come down with dementia/alzheimer’s. So far 3 of the men have it. One alcoholic uncle died already but not after years of dialysis and other problems. My mom is fuzzy. Only my two religious aunts seem fine - their hatred of all things liberal and judginess powers them through it.
It’s crazy to see all of them all go through daily/weekly/monthly treatments for various things (hips, knees, hypertension, dialysis, diabetes, head trauma, dementia, glaucoma treatment, etc.) that would literally bankrupt me in a month if I was paying full sticker price.
If you’re the kind of person who likes to know these things, it might be worth getting genetic testing (although idk what the risks are for insurance etc with that sort of information in USA#1, you’d want to check that out). There’s a gene called APOE which all the major companies test which gives you a lot of information about your Alzheimer’s risk. Risks are:
General population: 6% chance of Alzheimer’s by age 80
One copy of APOE risk allele (APOE4): 20% chance
Two copies: 80% chance
I carry one copy myself.
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I’d be curious how much exercise and keeping your mind active plays into those %s.
Also it’s hard to get super worked up about something by age 80 when I’m likely to have other issues.
My mom’s family seems to be getting it in their late 60s/early 70s. Although only my oldest surviving uncle is getting close to full blown dementia and he’s probably 78. But he’s been fuzzy for at least 5 years.
They’re also not super healthy and I think all the men might be alcoholics - although 2 of them hide it pretty well.
My Dad stays active mentally, walks everywhere, doesn’t drink, and is a picture of health at 79 other than glaucoma. Hopefully some of that will rub off.
Yeah, there’s suggestion that keeping cholesterol levels low will help ward it off to an extent even with the problem genes. It’s a hard thing to study, lot of confounding variables. APOE4 is definitely a major factor though.
“By age 80” is just the standard measure they use, obviously a lot of that 80% get it significantly earlier.
I read a story from the UK where a workplace got their employees free genetic testing - whereupon a lot of them were cheerfully informed that they were extremely likely to become demented. Oops.
By the way, this sort of stuff is another reason we need robust public healthcare - because it’s just going to be another way of bundling people into risk pools and not insuring the risky. Oh, wrong APOE allele? Sorry, no healthcare for you.
Looks like that for my mother’s side of the family too. Both of my maternal grandparents had it and now my uncle has it. My mother, aunt, and other uncle seem to be with it but then again my grandmother and grandfather didn’t start showing signs until their 70s. Rare to see my uncle showing it in his early 60s.
The women seem to live long in my family. Grandmothers on both sides of the family made it well into their 80s and a bunch of their sisters are alive and kicking in their 80s. The men on my father’s side get into their 60s if they’re lucky. My mother is overall pretty healthy and barring an accident will be around for a long time. Not sure if she’ll be with it or not then though.
It’s worth noting for myself, and the rest of the younger people on this forum that it’s reasonable to expect massive changes in the efficacy of healthcare treatments over the next 20-30 years. Biology and Social Sciences are going to see exponential advances because of CRISPR and big data respectively. We haven’t consumed even 10% of the low hanging fruit in those fields yet.
Probably something very similar for universities and professors.
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And both industries admins need a massive massive culling. The Democrats in particular are MUCH too deeply in the pockets of big education for my liking. Pretending like public teachers unions and universities are benign entities is super dangerous.
Basically we’re fucked. Normal people on both sides are too much in a panic about the other side to care that 99% of the laws and policies are enacted for donors, not constituents.
At least teachers unions give a bunch of people a cushy middle class life. R donors’ pet policies just create massive wealth for handful of people and dangerous shit jobs for the rest.
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