[ExI] Signing your death warrant

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Sun, Jun 7, 2020 at 2:17 PM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

>
> Rafal and SR, we must deal with the way ICU patients are cared for and
> paid for.  If a person has no insurance, then a few weeks in the ICU would
> impoverish their family, then I can completely see why a person would want
> nothing to do with that.  I wouldn't want that either.
>
> Ideally we should have some means of doing a limited-liability insurance
> policy whereby a person or family can buy some fixed amount, say 200k, to
> cover ICU expenses.  Then by agreement, when that money is gone, I'm gone.
>
> ### The family cannot be held liable for a person's medical expenses,
AFAIK, unless we are talking about a dependent child. The hospital could
collect from the estate though. Most of the time hospitals will transfer
uninsured care losses to us by increasing the prices they charge to us. The
1000% markups we pay for our care are intentional - they are just another
manifestation of the takers fleecing the makers.

Setting explicit limits on expenses that would allow a hospital to stop
providing care after a cap is reached, although very reasonable, is not
likely to happen. Most people try to avoid confronting their mortality.
Letting hospitals stop care based on economic considerations would be a
taboo trade-off - life and money cannot be explicitly traded off against
each other, on pain of moral outrage and political attack.

I wish I lived in a world of reasonable people.

Rafal
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