By Nick Jacobs

The Crash of 2012

No one can really predict when "IT" will hit, but those of us living in the trenches can feel the winds blowing from all directions toward a crash in the healthcare economy. I heard Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO of General Electric, say that the money spent on healthcare for GE employees equals approximately the same amount of money earned through the work of their massive GE Healthcare division. GE Healthcare pays for GE's healthcare.

Clearly, everytime the prodigal son or daughter returns from California, New York or Boston, they stand by mom or dad's bedside in the Critical Care Unit of our medical center and say, "Do whatever you need to do to keep him/her alive!" Their siblings have been watching the end of life progression and are comfortable with the transition, but the visiting child feels DEEP GUILT and forces the medical system to needlessly spend tens of thousands of dollars to neither improve the quality of life or death for their loved one.

We spend two-thirds of our valuable resources on the end of life in this country, and it doesn't stop that event from happening. As Kenny Rodgers said a few decades ago, "You gotta know when to hold them. Know when to fold them." As long as we don't recognize that there is a time to live and a time to die.

It's not morbid. It's not sad. It's just what it is, and until we realize that sometimes a peaceful, unmechanized death is much more preferable than a "do everything that you need to do to keep em alive" scenario is, we will continue to squander our precious healthcare dollars on a hopeless journey to the "fountain of youth."

Or, as my old friend, Carl Bombatch used to say, "Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to DIE."