In the Supreme Court arguments March 27th on health care, this exchange occurred:
“JUSTICE ALITO: Do you think there is a, a market for burial services?
GENERAL VERRILLI: For burial services?
JUSTICE ALITO: Yes.
GENERAL VERRILLI: Yes, Justice Alito, I think there is.
JUSTICE ALITO: All right, suppose that you and I walked around downtown Washington at lunch hour and we found a couple of healthy young people and we stopped them and we said, “You know what you’re doing? You are financing your burial services right now because eventually you’re going to die, and somebody is going to have to pay for it, and if you don’t have burial insurance and you haven’t saved money for it, you’re going to shift the cost to somebody else.”
Isn’t that a very artificial way of talking about what somebody is doing?GENERAL VERRILLI: No, that –
JUSTICE ALITO: And if that’s true, why isn’t it equally artificial to say that somebody who is doing absolutely nothing about health care is financing health care services?
From my experience as as a health and life insurance agent, scarcely any young people buy burial insurance, better known as life insurance, although it is very inexpensive. Very few young people buy health insurance either. The cost of someone dying without someone stepping forward to pay for it is borne by the taxpayer.
To use Justice Alito’s analogy, let’s say that a young person walking in downtown Washington is struck by a car and is uninsured. If the person dies, the cost of creation most likely would be less than $1,000. If the person suffers a traumatic brain injury, the average cost for those who do not survive is $454,717. For those who survive, there are many levels of cost depending on the type of care. The “average costs for medical and long-term care services averaged $196,460 for survivors receiving rehabilitation services”.
It will be interesting to see what the Supreme Court decides. Regardless, the cost of health care and dying occurs and must be borne by someone.