Another Modest Proposal

There is a flaw in the logic of health care reform leading to cost savings. Improving health can never lower costs. Extending life only leads to increased (albeit deferred) health care costs. In the end everybody still dies. The more advanced the age, the more complex and expensive the health care issues become.

If we really want to lower health care costs in the long run, may I propose increasing risk-based, preferably lethal, activities including:

• Promoting fast food abuse, especially the super size program.
• Encouraging smoking, particularly those forms involving inhaling.
• Televise the 'Darwin Awards.' Some are not aware of their available options.
• Start more wars.
• Advance access to extreme sports. Eliminate helmet laws.
• Lower the age of retirement to fifty. The most lethal year of a man's life is the twelve months immediately following retirement.
• Lower the driving age to ten.
• Give away motorized wheel chairs to finish-off the obese. If they start walking everywhere we will never be rid of them.

Attention to these and other more disasterously productive measures would lead to real savings in health care, unlike the frankly wrong-headed approach currently working its way through Washington. Thank you dear reader, and be careful out there.


PS - Dear reader, if your neighbor rudely reading over your shoulder at the Internet cafe finds this post offensive, please refer him to Jonathan Swift.