What's your reaction when the conversation turns to America's soaring health care costs – when you hear that by 2020, just six years from now, our health care spending will hit $4.5 trillion?
Maybe it's all too big, too "macro" for us to absorb on a personal level.
So try this: Should your 92-year-old grandmother undergo coronary artery bypass graft surgery –surgery that costs upwards of $20,000?
What about a girl who's 17 years old? Her leukemia treatments aren't working. Her liver is failing, other organs are failing, she is near death and her family is demanding a liver transplant, which the surgeon proposed, but the HMO refuses to authorize?
These are real-life dilemmas facing doctors, patients, and us.
We want everything modern medicine can offer, but as taxpayers we want health care costs controlled.
Can we achieve both goals?
Leonard Fleck, a professor of philosophy and a medical ethicist from Michigan State University, joined us today.
Listen to the full interview above.
