A Fark thread about heart surgery for patients in their 80s is actually causing a reasoned debate and not the typical Fark comment threads. Not sure how long the discussion will stay serious, but many of the commenters have personal stories of elderly relatives who did or did not undergo complicated, risky, and expensive procedures. There are no easy answers to problems with the American health care system, but the worst answer of all is the one that politicians are (predictibly) generally choosing to adopt — blanket generalizations, band-aid fixes, not addressing the root issues, and punting the problem to the next set of legislators. These debates need to be had, and we need to think as a society about how we want our health care system to work, because right now, it isn’t. (In particular I’m referring to hospitals, and note that the actual linked article that started the discussion thread is about the Canadian health care system, which has a different — well, in some ways, similar — set of problems.)