In America health care is supposed to be as expensive as possible. People demand the system spare no expense on their care.
I have some notes to write about "the predicaments of old people". Both my grandfathers lived an extra few years thanks to the pacemakers Medicare paid for. But they just suffered for those final years.
A lot of old people's problems are related to excess alcohol consumption. IMHO, there would be much more funds available to spend on the gaps experienced by younger people, if doctors assumed their elderly patients are drinking heavily and treated them for that instead of blowing the programs' budgets on treating the down-stream effects of heavy alcohol consumption [edit2].
I have some friends who lived in Canada for a while. They said the Canadian system doesn't go all-out to keep people alive who are going to die anyways...
A few years ago I stopped by to see one of the passengers whom I'd given a free ride to a few years before. She told me she was pregnant. "But I thought you were becoming a man?" She wasn't a he yet, and she'd gotten with a cis-male... They'd called it off before too long, but that's how she'd gotten knocked up. She also said it had a heart defect (she was maybe 4 months along?). This was caused by the hormones she'd been taking to transition.
I was pretty sure the baby wouldn't survive long, but didn't say anything... I followed them on teh Facebook. ... Scheduled c-section, a half dozen heart surgeries, after maybe four or six months the infant died anyways.
I think other countries' health systems are more careful about how they allocate their health resources [0].
[0] How Cubans Live as Long as Americans at a Tenth of the Cost - https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/11/cuba-heal...
[edit1: minor edits]
[edit2: changed this from quip about keeping people alive for an extra month or two]
