Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

http://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2011/12/16/how-doctors-die/

I strongly believe hospitals kill people, and that they should never have admitted my father for lung problems - emphysema - they knew damn well they could not do anything for. The best home-based breathing machine or oxygen would have been far better (he was rallying as far as the lungs and died due to blood poisoning contracted at the hospital).

But the rub in all the examples that author sites is that you just don't know for sure what will lead to the best quality of life and the longest. Tipping the incentives in the other direction would produce horror stories of the other kind, just as there are people dying too soon from lack of treatment (note that the system is particularly messed up in the US, though, as the expensive treatments are more often available to the old than to the young who could benefit a great deal more (e.g. get thirty more years of life instead of three).

If we're going to compare benefits of health care spending, resources diverted from keeping 80-year-olds alive (my late father, my still-going-strong grandfather) to preventative care for poor in third-world countries would have a massively greater impact-- but we don't have to make such monstrous tradeoffs, instead of someone giving up expensive end-of-life care to benefit thousands of children someone else could be giving up a three hundred foot yacht.