Bad Decisions

How many times have you bought something that you didn't need? I know I do, quite often. Every music CD I own and every movie is something I don't need to live. I don't need a television at all, and yet I have one. I could bike to work and not have a car; I could live in a smaller house and my kids could have no toys.

Odds are if you are reading this in your spare time on a computer, you too have bought some things that aren't absolute necessities.

When you bought those things, did you think to yourself, "Since I'm buying this item for entertainment, and not saving the money for medical care when I'm much older, I'm making the decision that my entertainment now is worth more than possibly extending my life later."

Probably not, even though that's exactly the decision you are making. If you've ever paid for anything that wasn't a basic necessity for life, you've (consciously or not) made the decision that that was more important to you than paying for medical expenses later. Even now, after reading this, you will probably still go out and buy things that aren't necessities.

Let's switch gears and say that you're now 55 years old and need $20,000 for a medical procedure that your insurance doesn't cover. Given the option, would you take back all the money you spent on entertainment to save your own life? If your children could give up all entertainment expenses for five years in order to pay the $20,000, wouldn't you expect them to do that to save your life? That seems like an obvious "YES!" to me. My children would be pretty heartless to value watching movies over saving dad's life.

So there's a paradox here. People are aware they are going to have to pay medical expenses at some point; they are also aware that insurance probably won't cover the entire expense. They also know if they were ever in trouble they'd gladly go back and not buy DVD's and TV's in order to live longer. Yet these same people still buy DVD's, luxury cars, expensive dinners at nice restaurants, and computers instead of saving the money for inevitable medical expenses later. Why?

The simple answer is that people are short-sighted, and don't like to think about becoming ill or the associated expenses until they are forced to. By any but the most tortured logic, not saving for inevitable medical expenses is the height of irresponsibility.

The other simple answer may be that people do indeed value entertainment and living a "good" life over living a long life. I'm sure this is true to some extent for many people; if so, making them pay for universal health care is a punishment. But I digress.

How do you feel about the guy who eats fast food for every meal and has a heart attack? How about someone who spends his last dime on drugs or alcohol instead of food? These are people who made very bad decisions and suffered the inevitable consequences; you probably have very little sympathy for them, and even less inclination to give up your money to bail them out.

How about the 55 year-old who needs a $20,000 surgery to live, but has no money to pay for it? That's pretty sad, right? What if that 55 year-old owns a Mercedes, and always has owned a luxury car? What if that 55 year-old carelessly bought a large house on a lake for more money than he could hope to afford? What if he had gambled his life savings away in Vegas over the past five years?

Are you starting to feel less sympathetic toward the hypothetical 55 year-old? If so, that's because you recognize that when we spend money we do indeed make a decision between the thing we are purchasing now and all possible future uses of that money.

This isn't a serious problem until people start demanding that other people pay for their past irresponsibility. The 55 year-old, who long ago decided that luxury cars and gambling were worth more than a long life, is now seeing the result of that decision.

"But wait," you say, "nobody told this guy that this was his choice. Now that we've read your blog and know better, isn't it ok for the guy to get the money from his son and we can now be responsible and live happily ever after?"

Fair enough. Let's assume this man's son pays for his father's medical expenses. The son lives frugally and minimizes entertainment expenses to do so. By paying for his father's care, he has no money left over to save for his own. The son gets to be 55 and has the same medical problems his father did, and has saved nothing. His son is an irresponsible gambler.

Now what?

Let's assume that an entire generation of people have made this decision over their entire lifetimes, leaving themselves and their country in massive amounts of debt, such that there is no way that they will ever hope to pay for the inevitable medical expenses coming. Let's also assume that the generation following is just over half the size of the previous generation, and nearly half of that generation is similarly irresponsible and unable to pay for their parents' medical bills. So our assumption leaves us in the predicament that to pay for the large generation's medical expenses, the most productive and responsible members of society will be held responsible for 3 or 4 older peoples' costs. This would be absolutely crippling economically. In fact, we no longer have to assume; that's exactly what's being proposed right now.

"BUT WAIT AGAIN!" you say. "You're missing the fact that this is the perfect reason to have universal health care! People won't act responsibly on their own, so we can make them!"

This would be true if the people in government weren't the same people who make the bad decisions that the rest of us did. In fact, by virtue of acting on a large, long-term scale, those in government can put off seeing the effects of their bad decisions until well after they and their children are dead. If this weren't true, social security and Medicare would be solvent.

There is a cost for irresponsibility, and the only way to avoid paying that cost is to be responsible in the first place, or to push the cost off onto someone else until the entire system collapses.

Seeing the cost of irresponsibility first-hand is a good lesson for people. "My dad died before his time because he was a drunken gambler" brings the message home much better than, "because my dad was a drunken gambler, someone's great-grandchild will live through a depression."

In fact, if the only people to suffer the consequences of your actions are people you will never meet, it's tempting to act however you like.