A little old lady, in her early seventies, often limps by my house. My neighbors say she's often in great pain, but is hoping to save enough for surgery some day, when she can get away from Kaiser. That's a supposedly non-profit HMO. Why doesn't KP do the surgery? Because they say "she's too old."

Kaiser sells health care to truck-drivers and low-level government workers. It has always been tight with surgery, is famous for that. So Death Panels may be nonsense. But here we're already mistreating the elderly. It's very legitimate to worry about what new thoughtless mechanisms they might not contrive to save money.
Instead of addressing the real causes of waste.

Jorge the surgery is probably as likely to make her worse off as better off.

Floccina - Wow you're so good you don't even need to know what's wrong with her to provide a useless opinion pulled from your butt.

Of course bloggers have been covering the lies and their sources for a while now, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's where the NYT got their story idea, if not their facts, from. But yes, it's good to see mainstream journalism working once in a while.

Jorge, what exactly are you arguing for? You seem to have a problem with Kaiser being non-profit, but obviously the old lady can't afford another insurer or she would have switched already. And if HR3200 passes she could actually make that switch if she wanted to because the insurance company wouldn't be able to discriminate against her based on her age or medical condition. So why do you think the status quo, which isn't providing her with the option of surgery (whether she needs it or not, which I obviously can't tell with only such a vague description as "she has a limp") is better than a reform that would likely increase her access to surgery, if she needs it?

AndrewS wrote, Wow you're so good you don't even need to know what's wrong with her to provide a useless opinion pulled from your butt.

That's true, but Jorge didn't provide a diagnosis either.

My ex-girlfriend's grandfather got surgery for cancer at age 98. He died post-operatively (still in the hospital) after he aspirated his own vomit.

Treating is often more dangerous an ill-advised than not treating.

Note that Jorge apparently hasn't asked the woman in question whether she has pain, but is relying on hearsay. It's hard to imagine that he has any better information regarding the real reason behind her not getting surgery.

Nonetheless, he does have an important point: we need to address waste in health care, and to do so in a way that is sensitive to individual rights. Government bureaucracies are sometimes too arbitrary, though many countries seem to implement national-level cost controls in ways that make their health care systems quite popular. It seems likely that we could, as well.

Unfortunately, our politicians seem addicted to corporate profits, which (a) distort health care decisions and (b) are one of "the real causes of waste."

Andrew S -

One of my doctors reassured me about a possible surgery saying something like 'don't worry about this, at your age you would never survive it.' I'm 81. He was joking. I think.

Joe

Dear Dean,
I read the article on-line which was as described. But I heard that the print edition headline did not use the word false.
John