Old, Sick and Poor is No Way to Spend Your Retirement

I recently got a personal glimpse into the ugly reality of getting old with a chronic disability. The sense of helplessness is terrifying, and that's for someone with employer-provided health insurance, a non-yet-elderly brain and a support network of family and friends.

Anyone who can even consider throwing even 70-year-olds to the piranhas of the private health insurance industry is a sociopath with a long history of torturing puppies. Sound like any rethuglicans you know?

Digby:

Sometimes I think that the best thing that the only way our country is going to survive is if all of our political elites are forced to live like an average American for the next two years. And by average, I don't mean the delusional upper middle class, highly educated, well-connected professional kind of average. I mean the world of the sandwich shop owner, the garage mechanic, the office supply salesman and the corporate clerical pink collar ghetto office assistant. People who make between 30 and 60k a year and don't have a lot of expectations that they will make much more. The middle class workers who don't get to go on TV or have anyone but their closest families and friends ever tell them how great they are and encourage them to believe they will accomplish great things. The people who are just living their normal lives in their normal communities, doing normal, everyday, unremarkable things. In other words, most people:

If they did they would find that observations like this are totally absurd:

Seniors would enter the health care world the rest of us live in, with co-payments, deductibles and managed care. Eventually, cost control would require some tough decisions about end-of-life care and the rationing of high-tech treatments that have limited efficacy. But starting with a value of $15,000 per year, per senior—the amount government now spends on Medicare—Ryan's vouchers should provide excellent coverage. His change would amount to a minor amendment to the social contract, not a fundamental revision of it.

That's written by an alleged liberal, by the way, not some tea partying moron.

Most old people would be lost in "the health care world the rest of us live in" because if you are self-employed or unemployed, as retirees are, you'd have to "shop" for insurance, go through huge hoops to get insured, manage a complicated health care bureaucracy that you don't understand, even when you are sick.(Anyone heard of elder scams? Yeah, I though so. And just because they are illegal doesn't mean they don't exist.) Doing all that is difficult even for people who aren't aged, infirm and often very ill with debilitating diseases. Acting as though throwing those people into the pool is going to somehow be beneficial to the individual, much less the system as a whole, is nonsensical in the extreme.

SNIP

For those of us who live the the world outside that employer covered system as this person suggests seniors should do, the idea that a sick old person of 70 could be covered for 15k a year is laughable. A good policy for a 50 year old with a health problem can cost that right now (and the health care reform isn't going to change it.) It's absurd on its face that sick senior citizens are going to be able to be "cost conscious." The assumption is that they are overusing the system, when the truth is that they are all in the rather immediate process of dying. So let's not kid ourselves that they are living in the same world we are as healthy adults. They aren't. And even those with good pensions won't be able to shoulder the high cost of senior medical care on their own. The only people who will have no worries at all under this are the upper 5%.

Cost of medical care is a problem across the board for all ages. Solving it by telling the sick elderly that they are just going to have to suck it up "and join the world the rest of us live in" isn't going to solve it. There are ways to control costs without putting the burden on sick people. If that's the best solution "liberals" can come up with in a rich country in which the top 1% of its citizens owns nearly half the country's wealth, then I'm afraid our little experiment in enlightenment has been a failure and it's back to the drawing board.

Read the whole thing.