Morton Marcus has a fun (in a grim sort of way) column in the Northwest Indiana Times. Those links go stale pretty fast, so even if it’s dead tomorrow, it was good today. Anyway, he writes about fictitious Sid Simpleton, the state’s social policy director, who has a no nonsense, focus on the bottom line, non-bleeding heart way of reducing the state’s health costs.
“[S]ome of us who think about policy are thinking the unthinkable. We don’t have any support from the governor on this, but we see ourselves as the advance phalanx of progress for Indiana’s prosperity.”
“What do you have in mind?” I asked.
“Ship out the old people,” Sid said. “People 65 and older account for about three-quarters of the state’s deaths. Everyone knows the bulk of health expenses are spent in the last weeks of life. We need to get those likely to be dying out of Indiana.”
“Market incentives,” Sid smiled, sipping on another drink. “First, we would make mailing lists of poor and sick Hoosiers available to retirement colonies outside Indiana.
“Second, we offer a Sunshine Subsidy, a flat payment to anyone 65 and older who volunteers to leave Indiana and not come back. Third, there is the Loved-one Lottery. This is open to out-of-state relatives of older Hoosiers. The winners get money to maintain their relatives somewhere else.”
“But retired people,” I objected, “have all that pension money we would be giving up while they are healthy.”
“Pensions,” Sid sighed, “are things of the past. A good bear market and 401(k) accounts will be paupers’ portfolios. But health care costs are going to go up.”
The FSSA wheels are already turning, I’m sure! Hey, Mitch Roob, Dr. Kevorkian is on line 1!
That’s hilarious. I met him 12 years ago and Morton Marcus is one of the brightest, wittiest people in Indiana, IMHO. He doesn’t have a blog, does he?
Hmmm…why is this crystal in my palm blinking red?
This is pretty funny, but not too far off the mark. I attended a meeting earlier this year in which a couple of the gov’s flacks were explaining his plan to reduce the number of elderly people on Medicaid in nursing homes. One of the things that was mentioned was giving tax breaks/incentives to people (presumably adult children, many of whom will have left Indiana to have decent careers) so that they would take care of their ailing relatives outside of nursing homes. I don’t know how serious they were, or if there is actually such a plan in the works.
The flacks kept harping on people being so ill when they are elderly because they hadn’t taken care of themselves earlier in their lives. So, if you have a family history of Alzheimer’s and then get it yourself, it is your own darn fault! I asked what the state planned to do to either see to it that people had better preventive health care through their employers or to provide such care if employers don’t. The flacks avoided answering the question.