Buying yourself extra years of life...

Catching up on our reading, we came across a very interesting article in the NY Times, Making Health Care the Engine That Drives the Economy by Gina Kolata, which made the same point Dr. Ridge made in his posting below: “we are all going to reach the point where adding a year to our life is worth more than anything else we could spend our money on.”

It seems we have reached this point.

Several economists from top universities in the Country arrive at the same conclusion: the Boomer generation would rather spend their money on medicine than, say, materialistic things. In a way, they are buying themselves one, three, maybe even five more years of life.

The healthcare system is far from perfect (VERY FAR)—and healthcare is very expensive in this country (unfortunately, as the article pointed out, half of the money spent is wasted). However, given a choice between spending your money on materialistic items and spending it on medicine/healthcare resulting in extra year of life, wouldn’t you choose the latter?

We would.