Philipp Missfelder, the 25-year-old chairman of the youth wing of Germany's Christian Union party. More:
- Old people in Germany go too much to the doctor. They go there for entertainment or because they are lonely. Waiting rooms are full of old people using them as a social playground. The problem is no one has any idea how much that costs.
Missfelder is saying now what more and more of Europe and Japan's younger populations are going to be saying increasingly loudly in the coming decades. The young are going to be carrying the old with ever increasing taxes, and little promise themselves of ever getting any benefits. Eventually, an age war will occur: young against old. Who do you think will win? It will get very, very ugly. Remember the prophetic final line, uttered by Edward G. Robinson, in the movie "Soylent Green," the great dystopian film considered sci-fi when it came out. The final line? Listen to it yourself:"Soylent Green is made from people."
Before I went into anesthesiology, I was a family doctor for two years. My experience was precisely that described by Missfelder above. Old people who paid nothing for their medical care came routinely to see me for nothing. They were bored, scared, and lonely, and a trip to the doctor was the best thing in their week, what with the actual journey, visiting with other bored, scared, and lonely old people in the waiting room, and then the undivided attention of a young doctor who was being paid to listen to them. This is precisely what drove me into anesthesiology.
Article comments
1 - Robert Brady
No need for hip replacements at all, if people would get off the drug/doctor wagon and into the freedom of simple prevention and self-healing; but the massive drug industry and entrenched medical establishment are pushing mightily to see that that doesn't happen, to keep the health problems coming and the money flowing. Amazing that more people do not perceive this, though as I say there are mighty forces arrayed against public awareness.
2 - Harriet
Most people who reach 85 have almost certainly paid taxes for a very long time, and many of them started work at 14. Also, a lot of them are veterans, or the wives/mothers of veterans. So they have good reason to feel entitled to medical care.
Maybe there are old people who visit the family doctor to get out of the house. There are also old people who suffer in silence because it's the way they were brought up, and they hate to bother anyone; these are often the same old people that die alone of hypothermia because they can't afford heating and are too proud to apply for benefits or what they see as 'charity'.
Whatever, it might have been better to attempt to organize some kind of program for your lonely patients, or find a list of programs to refer them to.