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From an economic perspective, health reform will fail if we can’t sometimes push back against the try-anything instinct.
When it's your child, or spouse, or parent who's at risk, it's not going to be terribly reassuring to hear that some options will simply be characterized as a "try-anything" gambit and refused because of their cost.
And the end game is decidedly ugly. As Leonhardt puts it:
Eventually, we may well have to decide against paying for expensive treatments with only modest benefits.
'Scuse me, but doesn't that sound eerily like the possibility of a death panel for Grandma -- at least if her treatment gets too "expensive" and the benefits to her are deemed to be "only modest"?
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