Comment by bhawks
2 years ago
Senior / elderly care can be enormously expensive. Especially towards end of life. I could agree with you if the population was all teen to 45 year olds but that is not realistic.
The same dynamics play out with pension schemes. Declining birth rates play havoc with proposals that rely on a large, young employed base who's work supports a small, retired set of pensioners.
My own perspective is that healthcare is extremely limited on the provider side. Professional organizations have been limiting the supply of doctors / doctor equivalents for decades. Not to minimize the work a family medicine or general practitioner puts in, but many important health services/early interventiona can be safely and reliably provided by a nurse practitioner or physicians assistant (what a horrible name) on a much larger and affordable scale then exists today.
I always believed that nurse practitioners would be just about as good at primary care as a doctor. But fuck me my nurse practitioner is useless. Like tons of British Columbia residents I don’t have a family doctor, so thought this would work. But they are afraid to do anything. At least a doctor will be confidently wrong like chat gpt.