Age Based Rationing In Health Care

Healthcare has always been a hot topic in the United States. Most of the discussions involving healthcare are concerned with the costs of and how it should be used. A solution that people have come up with to fix this issue is by placing the use of age-based rationing in the healthcare system. The Medical Dictionary definition of age-based rationing is, “A proposed form of rationing publicly-funded health care services, in which limits would be placed on the type and amount of such services that would be freely available to persons above a certain age” (“Age-based rationing.” McGraw-Hill…). The idea of reducing the amount of healthcare older people receive started in the 1980’s (“Old-Age-Based…”). In 1983, Alan Greenspan made a statement to

When it comes to deciding who should receive healthcare, people think that someone that is younger needs to receive the care instead of an elderly person (“Age-Based Rationing of Healthcare.”). Reasoning behind this is that a younger person is expected to have more years left on their life expectancy after getting the care that is needed. While if an older adult gets the care that is needed for them, they will still be closer to the end of their life expectancy and may still die at that time. People see it as younger individuals have not had the chance to live their life, but an older individual has. Some people see it as throwing away money to help older people when they are just going to die eventually anyways. Another reason behind this is overpopulation. With the population increasing, there will be more children and families that are established. Healthcare will be directed towards these families more because there are more families now than there were fifty years

Healthcare services may look at these elder individuals as just another expense that they have to pay for. Healthcare services may think that by not giving the elder individuals the services they need, that it will save them money. However, if you were to do the same thing to someone making these executive decisions for the healthcare services, they may feel differently about it because you are affecting their individual life. The healthcare services don’t think on the aspect of this person has a family and loved ones, they only see money being