Policymakers should focus healthcare more on achieving wellbeing over whole lifetimes

For complex anthropological, social, professional and legal reasons, many Western countries spend appreciable portions of their healthcare budgets on end-of-life care – between 13% and 25% of US Medicare budgets (depending on definitions). Paul Dolan uses a psychological model called ‘Terror Management Theory’ to make a personal exploration of the arguments for policymakers to assign a lower proportion of budgets to such purposes and to assign more influence to whole-life wellbeing.