The total cost to the State of our healthcare coverage until our death is close to infinite. The progress of healthcare is extraordinary, which extends our life, but using more and more healthcare (tests, treatments, interventions, medical products, pharmaceuticals, hospital stays, etc.).

When an estimate is made of how much this may represent for an average person, the figures are enormous. It is impossible to be confident that the tax we pay will be adequate to cover a person who can retire at 65 and live with health care for another 50 years. This may be normal in 20 or 30 years' time.

This status has led many countries to the wisdom that we should all be aware that healthcare is like housing or food and that we have to start thinking that if we want better housing or better food we will have to pay for it. And that as people we cannot accept that someone dies of hunger or lives in the street, but that this person does not expect Ferran Adrià to cook his daily meal and that we pay for a room in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

There is no choice but to think that the solution is that we pay for our own health care or a good part of it. Many already do this with private insurance, but for others it will be necessary to design a gradual formula whereby they start by paying a part -co-payment- which will inevitably increase over the years.

I have just listened to a talk at Havard University on lecture by Dr. Baselga, professor at the University and researcher leader in cancer at the Massachusetts General Hospital, in which he explained the number of areas in which his hospital is working to improve efficiency and reduce costs without losing the world's leading quality. This is, of course, another way, to do better in the area of healthcare provision.

As Europeans, with a humanist and solidarity mentality, we should not allow someone who can be saved to die for lack of means, just as we should not allow someone who is broke to die of starvation or live in the open air. But these are borderline cases and that is how it should be in healthcare.