The Resistible Growth of Health Care Costs

Abstract

Rather than our routinely blamed ageing demography, pharmaceutical promotion and the medical business, not research, are responsible for our ever growing health bill. To keep essential health care affordable, only what has been proved necessary and cost effective should be financed by some kind of risk mutualisation system. Hedonistic care should be left to the free market.

From conception to death, a devastating culture of medicalization and therapeutic agressivity has turned naturally inexpensive processes, such as conception, birth, ageing and death, into over-priced medical achievements. The increasing lack of personal and social responsibility triggered by the market, such as junk food, tobacco, drugs, sedentarity or trash media, multiply life-threatening illnesses such as diabetes 2, obesity, cardiovascular diseases and all kinds of cancers.

Screenings require millions of participants and intense statistical analysis to prove any efficacy. Screenings, testings and proactive practices make people sick and produce more patients than they save lives, while generating exceptional returns on investments thanks to state and insurance financing; they should be put under public control. New drugs are unaffordable in spite of their dubious efficacy which often relies on biased and underpowered studies. Because they target desperate, debilitating, up to now incurable diseases like metastatic cancers, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer, polyarthritis, Crohn disease, patients and their families want them by any means and at any price. The answer to the North-South health gap is in a global deal: a declining demographic trend, already well under way and free circulation not only of goods but also of people which would in the long run shape up the age pyramid of a progressively mixed population. That could also save lives at both ends of the human chain: those who die from starvation and those who die from overfeeding.

Key Words:

• Health care
• ageing
• ethics
• costs

Additional information

Notes on contributors

O.V. Grosjean

Oscar V. Grosjean Liège University, Belgium E-mail: [email protected]