The message is clear: socialized medicine kills.

At least, that’s the inference the writer of this Associated Press article obviously wants us to draw: “More serious problems in Britain's health care were reported last month, when cancer researchers announced that as many as 15,000 people over age 75 were dying prematurely from cancer every year.”

Uh, hello? People over age 75 dying “prematurely?”

We all have to die. As a child I once heard my grandfather admonish my grandmother, “Ah geez, Mary – you gotta go sometime.”

More to the point, what difference does it make if you die of cancer, or you die of something else at the exact same time? The only statistic that means anything to you as an individual is the overall death rate. And while we spend two-and-a-half times as much, per capita, on health care as they do in the UK, life expectancy is higher in the UK than in the US.

The truth of the matter is, here in the US we have gone preposterously past the point of diminishing returns in terms of spending on medical care. Between 1980 and 2003, per capita spending on drugs, adjusted for inflation, increased seventeen times. Not seventeen percent more -- SEVENTEEN TIMES more. And during this period, life expectancy at 65 barely budged -- and I’d wager that most of the increase -- maybe all -- was due to the fact that fewer people are smoking.

The burden of proof ought to be on anybody who proposes that more spending on high-tech medical care will prolong life expectancy. A study published in  Archives of Internal Medicine compared patients with terminal cancer who had end-of-life discussions with their physicians with those who did not. The patients who did not have such discussions endured more invasive medical treatments, suffered more, and in the opinion of their caregivers, had a poorer quality of death than those who did have such discussions.

And here’s the punchline – THEY DIDN’T EVEN LIVE ANY LONGER!

In fact, they tended to die a little bit sooner (although the difference didn’t reach statistical significance) – even though they were not as sick to begin with.

In the book of Genesis, it says, “Our days on earth are three score and ten, or fourscore if we are strong.” In other words, we can infer that at the time that was written, if you didn’t die of accidents or violence or infectious disease, you could expect to live to be about 80. Today, if you don’t die of accidents or violence or infectious disease, you can expect to live to be, uh, about 80.

We still grow old and die. That hasn’t changed.

I wish everybody involved in the health care debate would begin by acknowledging a simple truth: death is not some rare and preventable anomaly – it is life’s greatest certainty.

Death is life’s bitterest fact, no doubt about it. I just don’t believe that the solution is to ply our senior citizens with as many expensive and invasive and potentially dangerous treatments as they will stand for.

Recently I was visiting the sister of my late father. My father was estranged from her, and for most of my life I was only vaguely aware of her existence. She’s now 80 years old, and with no prompting at all on my part, she told me, “All the ladies at the homeowners’ association, we’ve all decided: No more mammograms, no more colonoscopies. You gotta die of something.”

Indeed. And the only remedy I can think of is to let the ones you love know it today. Tomorrow may be too late.