•August 1, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

As I near 77, I find myself on a treadmill, you might say, of visits to doctors, specialists, clinics, hospitals. Ditto for many contemporaries I hang with. I worry that our society can’t afford all the health care that we oldsters enjoy.
In just the past few years, I have had procedures or operations for Lasik, cataracts, hernia repair, depression, prostate cancer, arrythmia, and more, plus many medications and endless check-ups.
I have no idea what all that costs, because we are shielded from the numbers. I did read that the new-fangled proton beam radiation treatments for my prostate cancer cost $100,000, several times the cost of traditional radiation for prostate cancer. But Medicare covered the treatments, and I was told there wouldn’t likely be any important side effects (there were), so who cares?
As a result, I am in relatively good health, and thankful. Yet still I worry that we are robbing Peter to pay Paul for all this.
Some background. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that 5 percent of the population consumes half the costs of health care. This nickel slice isn’t all for oldsters, but much of it is.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.