You seem to be arguing that a) old age in the US is a horrifying nightmare of financial exploitation and b) everything about the US system is fine and dandy. Which is it? Is financial exploitation of the elderly by legal guardians a relatively rare occurrence that public bodies are doing an effective job of preventing, or are there grievous systemic failings in the US health, social care and legal systems?
Yes. I have also worked as a welfare advisor, with direct involvement in cases involving issues of mental capacity, legal guardianship and residential care.
>It's not any different.
Clearly it is very different. There's no financial incentive here for over-treating elderly patients - NHS trusts are not paid per treatment. If a doctor or hospital chooses to administer unnecessary treatment, they have less money in their budget and their performance targets are negatively impacted. A service provider cannot arbitrarily rack up fees, because that's not how we fund health or social care.
In many states in the US, a completely unvetted person can apply for guardianship of someone they have never met. In many states, there is effectively no oversight of legal guardianship due to a lack of funding. In many states, guardianship is administered by local courts with no specific expertise.
I did. On the first page of results I found some tabloid news articles, a Scientology front group and an NHS summary of the research paper they were all citing. The paper concluded that, while neuroleptic drugs are prescribed more frequently in care homes than in community prescribing, it is not clear whether that is due to inappropriate prescribing or selection bias.
I am not arguing that the UK is a utopia, but I cannot reconcile "Elderly without children to check in on them are seen as ATM's" and "Extract as much money as possible and don't care about the person" with my knowledge and experience of elderly care in the UK. Parts of our system are chronically under-funded, we have unreasonably long waiting times for many services, there's a shortage of care workers, but I've seen nothing to suggest that elderly people are being used as cash cows.
You have a point, to an extent. Coverage and welfare state benefit programs have continued to move considerably higher however. The US is now at the OECD middle on its welfare state spending as a percentage of GDP.
Half of Americans receive coverage via the government in some form. 70 million Americans are on Medicaid & CHIP (~22% of the population). Then you have Medicare, VA, SS disability, numerous state & smaller federal programs, and then partial subsidies via the ACA.
If you make minimum wage in the US, you're going to qualify for free healthcare in nearly all states via Medicaid. Via the ACA, the cost with subsidization when you're a little bit higher economically still comes out to tens of dollars per month (which is not a terrible price given how expensive healthcare is in the US, although the coverage is still not what it should be).
The bottom 25% is mostly able to get free or cheap healthcare. The next 25% bracket gets frequently royally screwed, they're stuck in a bad spot and often bounce in and out of having coverage. The top ~50% are covered by their employers commonly.
There is free healthcare, power of attorney, everything you described is the same in the US other than the terminology.
People out of the US have a very skewed view of healthcare in the US.
All children, all elderly, and poor people with serious illness are all covered fully.