The Case for Killing Granny

The idea that we might ration health care to seniors (or anyone else) is political anathema. Politicians do not dare breathe the R word, lest they be accused—however wrongly—of trying to pull the plug on Grandma. But the need to spend less money on the elderly at the end of life is the elephant in the room in the health-reform debate. Everyone sees it but no one wants to talk about it. At a more basic level, Americans are afraid not just of dying, but of talking and thinking about death. Until Americans learn to contemplate death as more than a scientific challenge to be overcome, our health-care system will remain unfixable.
Compared with other Western countries, the United States has more health care—but, generally speaking, not better health care. There is no way we can get control of costs, which have grown by nearly 50 percent in the past decade, without finding a way to stop overtreating patients. In his address to Congress, President Obama spoke airily about reducing inefficiency, but he slid past the hard choices that will have to be made to stop health care from devouring ever-larger slices of the economy and tax dollar.

America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being

Presents statistics about children’s economic security, health, behavior, social environment, and education. This biennial report to the Nation on the condition of children in America provides nine contextual measures describing the changing population, family, and environmental context in which children are living, and 25 indicators depict the well-being of children in the areas of economic security, health, behavior and social environment, and education. The 2005 report has special features on children with asthma, children with specified blood lead levels, and parental reports of children’s emotional and behavioral difficulties. In addition, the report includes a special section on family structure and the well-being of children. The Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics produces this annual report, which offers the most recent available data from official sources in a nontechnical, user-friendly format.