"...Life is not just breathing and existing as a self-enclosed skin bag.
It’s doing the activities with others you were put on earth to do.
But it’s also valuable as a backdrop to the current budget mess.
This fiscal crisis is about many things, but one of them is our inability to face death
— our willingness to spend our nation into bankruptcy
to extend life for a few more sickly months.
The fiscal crisis is driven largely by health care costs.
...our health care spending and innovation are not leading us
toward a limitless extension of a good life.
...Years ago, people hoped that science could delay the onset of morbidity.
We would live longer, healthier lives and then die quickly.
This is not happening.
Most of us will still suffer from chronic diseases for years near the end of life,
and then die slowly.
...that phrase, “marginally extend the lives of the very sick,” should ring in the ears.
Many of our budget problems spring from our quest to do that.
The fiscal implications are all around.
A large share of our health care spending is devoted to ill patients
in the last phases of life.
This sort of spending is growing fast.
Americans spent $91 billion caring for Alzheimer’s patients in 2005.
By 2015...the cost of Alzheimer’s will rise to $189 billion...
...it is hard to see us reducing health care inflation seriously
unless people and their families are willing to
...confront death and their obligations to the living.
There are many ways to think about the finitude of life.
...My only point today is that we think the budget mess
is a squabble between partisans in Washington.
But in large measure it’s about our inability to face death
and our willingness as a nation
to spend whatever it takes to push it just slightly over the horizon."
David
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