(January 6, 2012 at 5:29 am)The Magic Pudding Wrote: These are questions that may apply more to countries that supply a free health service rather than to the US.
At the risk of another thread derail...
Don't think that we don't - it's just done extremely inefficiently in the US (i.e. people without healthcare make use of costly emergency services which are in effect subsidized by those that are able to pay). (That's not to say that access is anywhere near equitable - it isn't, and that is one of major flaws of our system.) The economics aren't the same as it is in countries with universal health care systems, but it's still an issue relevant to the US.
Regarding the other points you raised - I don't really have an answer for that. It is a fact that the vast majority of health care expenses come at the end of one's life, and there's a balance to be struck between extending life for it's own sake and providing a quality of life for the time that one has remaining. It's a difficult value judgement no matter what the underlying economics are.
