Killing the Elderly

Obamacare would have the de facto effect of saving money in many entitlements:
1. Medicaid;
2. Medicare;
3. Veteran's Hospitals;
4. Social Security Retirement;
5. Social Security Disability;
6. SCHiP, etc.

Five out of the six are mostly for the aged. Each of these programs will save money for every year one of their beneficiaries dies earlier than currently expected.

Assume that Medicaid would cost $3,000 per year per patient in their last ten years of life only. In that period, that saves $30,000 per patient. Nursing homes in Indiana cost a measly $120 per day or $3600 per month or $43,200 per year. The average patient is only in for two years, so we don't actually see $100,000 per patient in Indiana. But New York or California might. Indiana's still close.

One third of patients will need this type of care. The actual projected cost per patient should be the actual cost times the probability of care or $28,512 per person over 65.

If we quit paying for life-extending care in persons aged 85 and up, that would save the last two years of life expenses on much of that 33% of the population. The $28,512 per person over a population of 2.1 million people in 2010 (National Institutes of Health, Institute on Aging), that could save $59.9 billion. For the next age cohort of 75 to 84, find a way to reduce their projected population 17 million in 2010 or 18 million in 2015 or 20 million in 2020 by 10% and you save another $59 billion on the same math.

Reduce every other age cohort through attrition of bad care by 0.5% to 1% with cost per patient of $3,000 in an America of 300 million inhabitants, you can save $90 billion per year.

I have shown a very dramatic example by reductio ad absurdum. No American will tolerate this methodology imposed nakedly. Bury the method behind rhetoric and "for the good of the country" nonsense and a quick incentive to kill the elderly will creep in.

Smaller populations reduce healthcare costs. Abort them. Let them die early. Obamacare saves money.

The problem is that healthcare costs cannot go down, as I have suggested in earlier posts.

So now the costs keep rising because supplies of providers dwindle and need to be replaced in a very expensive fashion; the ability to provide care must be rationed to maintain the current level of care for some preferred portion of the country. According to Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of Obama's health advisors, that preferred portion of the population is late middle-aged.

In Logan's Run, the solution to knocking off people over 30 was Carousel.



Is Obamacare going to implement this?