Week 9: Aging

I found the article, “As Good as it Gets” very interesting this week. It seems as though we hear a lot about health care in the media these days, but not a lot about other countries health care. My parents live in Sweden and the other day my father had to see a cardiologist and it was covered 100%, I was stunned. Granted their taxes are a bit higher, but their out of pocket costs on dental and healthcare are almost nothing, which in my opinion outweighs the taxes; especially for people that are aging or chronically ill and require more care. It is inevitable that we are all going to age and I believe that the US needs to have better programs in place to handle the gap between what retired people collect in Social Security, versus their medical costs. Maybe instead of giving everyone a large stipend, base it off their income and medical bills? Thoughts? I am open to ideas.

The second thing that piqued my interest was the different biological theories of aging. The wear and tear theory would have been my first assumption, besides acute disease, that causes death, but it seems there are multiple theories. If I had all the money and time I wanted I would do more research on the Free Radicals theory. It seems odd to me that your body would create random chemicals that help the aging process, but maybe they aren’t so random after all. Maybe they are meant to develop when the wear and tear on your body is too much.