Speculist Explains why Seniors Get More Medicare Dollars

Phil Bowermaster has an excellent piece at the Speculist on medicare, senior citizens, life extension and financial choices for healthcare.

Seniors get more medicare dollars because more seniors die in any year than children or other groups. Most medicare dollars are spent in the last 6 years of life.

Fighting aging has a related article.

The rules made and vast sums of money moved around (and wasted) by government employees distort all businesses, all decisions, all processes in medicine. Once you step into the swamp and start debating which clump of mud should be over here versus over there, then every argument you make has the largely ignored cost of government waste and government regulation attatched to it.

The costs are not independent of the arbitrary rules that have been created. Consideration should be given to revamp the rules to achieve lower costs and faster and better results in radically improved medicine. Otherwise real progress will have to be made outside of places like the USA and Europe where there is too much bureaucracy (FDA etc…) that does not have rules tested and reversed if they are shown not to add more value than they cost in time and waste.