"Incurable Disease" is code for "We Don't Understand How this Disease Functions"
How do you treat something you don't understand?
Depending on who you talk to, there are currently some one hundred-plus incurable diseases that medical science neither understands nor can effectively cure. Physicians can attempt to treat the symptoms to ease some of the suffering, and hospitals can monitor the patient's health status during the disease process, but none of this will lead to a cure and may, because of the inevitable arbitrariness of the nature of the treatment, result in harm to the patient.
I recently met a woman who, for nearly a decade, had been treated for lupus disease, one of the 'incurable' autoimmune diseases that can severely compromise quality of life. After ten years of medications, treatment, and observation for this disease, she was told that, ". . . actually, you are not suffering from lupus . . . you have rheumatoid arthritis." From that point on, doctors began medicating her for rheumatoid arthritis, another 'incurable' disease. She's now been on these medications — previous versions of which caused moderate to severe side effects — for three years.
Doctors and hospitals will get paid regardless of the outcome. If the patient dies, or is severely injured, as a result of one, or a culmination of these treatments, doctors and hospitals will still get paid — even though they've produced nothing of real value for the patient and may have created serious disease where none existed before.
Since today's mainstream medical industry ignores the wider spectrum of possible remediation protocols for all incurable diseases, patients are trapped by their current insurance options. 'Suitable' treatments and remediation protocols adopted as standards for insurance payout guidelines are set by the mainstream medical industry. Circular and dangerous, these kinds of myopic attempts at controlling so-called 'health'-care have now evolved into a system that forces the population, by law, to buy expensive medical insurance policies that offer patients with 'incurable' disease nothing more than limited access to and, in some cases, half-baked remediation solutions while offering nothing in the way of effective disease management or preventative care. The scope of this problem has made healthcare in America simultaneously ridiculously expensive and ineffective and risky for some. Return visits to the hospital or the doctor's office for failed remediation, harm done by prescription drug side effects or other failed protocols or treatments, are costly in terms of quality of life for the patient and an unnecessary financial burden shouldered by the rest of us.