Good story this morning by The Washington Post’s Chris Jenkins on the rising impact of medical care on the state’s budget. Even the fabled fickle Del. Vince Callahan (R-Fairfax) says there’s not much you can do about it.
“If anybody had any good ideas about reducing these increases, I haven’t heard them yet,” Callahan said. “We can save some money around the edges, but the inevitable fact is that [costs] just keep going up.”
Now the anti-taxers are fond of suggesting that costs shouldn’t go up more than the rate of population increase and inflation. But as Jenkins points out, the cost of medical care is predicated by increases in technology, which in turn, have helped people live a lot longer.
But if the anti-taxers want to keep costs down, I’ve got an idea: Let them give us a date when they should die. It should be before they start to require extraordinary facilities to keep them alive, say a hospital bed, or at least any medical device, drug or service discovered after they were born. Then on that date, assuming the gas chamber is free that day, we’ll send them to their final reward. They should be pleased as it minimizes the taxes they’d have to pay.