The Glade 4.0

Not magic but I understand how people who are unfamiliar with the actual functioning of capitalism believe that it functions as to superstition.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

It's neither fantasy nor magic. You can't identify where the expenses are incurred. Instead you are determined to do no more than spread FUD and attacks around. In support of a position which seems to boil down to "Every human life is infinitely valuable, and therefore all expenditures necessary to preserve such are justified and required".

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All organ transplants
dialysis
xray
cat scan
mri
appendectomy's
skin grafts
lasik
every medical procedure known to man

Has always come down in price over time since first use.

Why do you believe this to be an exception Xeq?

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

My original point was, our most successful models of societies in the world don't fit within your ideal. On the contrary, it's hard to even find a single society of importance or lasting effect that has been completely "free". I'd wager it has something to do with human nature.

Perhaps we have different opinions as to what makes a society "important" and if "lasting effect" is something that is desired in society and if so desired above freedom?

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I think history shows that to be the case. People would much rather have some sort of structure and perceived safety than to "go it alone".

Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge had a lasting effect but I don't think it was positive.

Genghis Khan was an important figure in history but I don't think that is a plus for his style of imposed order.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Indeed, even when presented with a small kitten to carry as backup.

*sagenod*

I pointed out exactly where the expenses are incurred. What I can't predict is how much those expenses will drop in price under a "free market" system. You can't, either, but you seem totally convinced that it will become easily affordable despite this.

You know how many times I've seen this argument line? You can't admit to yourself that your philosophy has a pretty good chance of killing her, and many others, so you cling to this. The free market will solve everything! Every necessary treatment WILL be affordable by everyone!

And yet the empirical evidence indicates your philosophy created the current mess in the first place, Xeq ...

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No, you have an end number. You've theorized some set of costs to produce the injection, most of which are startup costs. You don't have any idea what impact they are bearing on the current street cost. I would wager negligible or nil. It appears that the cost of intravenous immunoglobulin is $50/g. For primary immune dysfunction, 100-400 mg/kg of body weight every 3-4 weeks is implemented. Let's assume the girl in question weighs 45 kg, and that the maximum dosage is required. That means the contents of the injection itself costs $900. What's the rest of it, Xeq? Even if we calculate a dosage of 2g/kg of body weight, that comes out to $4500 for the contents of the injection. What's the rest of it, Xeq?

My philosophy isn't killing anybody. This appears to be a scarce resource. Somebody is already dying. Somebody, no matter what, will die, until such time as either the resource is sufficient for the demands, or the resource demands are alleviated due to other factors. Now, you've allowed that a bone marrow transplant is a solution. You've also seen fit to throw in that such a procedure carries with it a 1/5 chance of death, as if that was some determining factor. I don't know if you're aware, but that's a 4/5 chance of life, or 80%, which is good odds. Live or die, if this girl receives a bone marrow transplant, that frees up the resource she was consuming to provide life for someone else. Why are you so dismissive of a bone marrow transplant, then? Shouldn't your philosophy be demanding this girl undergo a bone marrow transplant?

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Xeq, why do you think universal healthcare will somehow let us provide every necessary treatment to everyone?

This is what I'm talking about when I say that no amount of money will ever satisfy the free healthcare crowd. This is why you are incorrect when you say the center-right has to accept that the "problem" cannot be solved by private charity.

The "problem" is not that everyone cannot get every "necessary treatment". This is an unreasonable definition of what the problem is. It will never be solved because someone will always be defining some new treatment as necessary; either because there is a new treatment that has been developed, or because the previous treatments are all widely accessbile, and now new treatments can be focused on to demand money for.

Basically, we don't even have a reasonable definition of "necessary". "Necessary" could be lifesaving care, or any concievable care that would improve quality of life to any degree, or any point in between, but even "lifesaving" care is not a good definition since many forms of care are only a chance of saving life and may involve massive expendatures of resources for little chance of survival. "Necessary" care for what end? An open-ended "necessary" makes it impossible to even discuss the issue productively.

The "free healthcare" crowd has got to give up the idea that lack of healthcare is killing people. This is simply an emotional bludgeon to get people to agrree with it. Lack of healthcare does not kill people; sickness and injury do - not everyone lacking healthcare will get fatally sick or injured before reaching old age, and not everyone who has access to healthcare will be saved if they do. It improves the odds, yes, but that's all.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Not to mention that this hypothetical society with no imposed order has practically no chance to defend itself from an organized outside attacker. It should not escape notice that the only example we've seen of this society so far lived on an island pretty far out in the North Atlantic ocean, and which had little to make it an attractive target for conquest, in an era when such conquest would have been pretty difficult over such ocean distances in the first place.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

No, that's not it. When you give an example of a $100,000/year annual treatment and then say, "under private health care, nobody would be able to afford this." The response from the center-right is always, and I mean always, that the free market and charity will find a way to provide that treatment. Nobody EVER responds by saying that under the private system this person may need to do without it and may die. That position would at least be honest and logical. Both sides are totally convinced that there is a ludicrously immense amount of graft, waste, and theft going on, (the left blames insurance companies, the right blames the government) and that a treatment that now costs $10,000/month could easily be provided for $1,000/month instead if we just put the government in/got the government out of health care.

It just happened in this thread. Shuyung is absolutely convinced that the example treatment I gave would be available for an affordable price, without really knowing how or why that would be the case. It is simply not reasonable to assume that health care costs could be cut by 90% regardless of what the politicians implement. It comes down to choosing between forcing the rich to pay for the treatment of the poor and lower middle class, or letting the poor/lower middle class die if they contract one of any number of nasty health problems. There is no magic middle ground where you save all the poor people and don't have to demand extra money from the rich people.

The problem is that A) unspecified treatments like that are not good examples; this is simply inventing some aribitrary combination of cost factors without consideration as to the existence or frequency of such a condition B) some people clearly CAN afford it and C) It's well-understood that with serious conditions tht cost this much, they are often going to be futile regardless. Private charity does not NEED to be able to provide the treatment to everyone. Furthermore, plenty of people here HAVE acknowledged that some people will die, and in any case some are going to anyhow.



So?



I hate to break it to you, but his assumption is not unfair at all since you just invented a $100k/year treatment out of the blue for some hypothetical condition.

Moreover, it is NOT a matter of simply choosing to "let them die" because a great many of these health problems are not fatal, private charity WILL cover many, and many people DO have insurance even if they are in the poor/lower middle class. I've had jobs making as little as $10.50 an hour with health insurance.

What you're really talking about is a small increase in survival chance for the rich because many of these extremely expensive conditions will be fatal no matter what, when taking into accoutn that it is far from a binary "rich can afford it, other's can't" situation.

You also still have not addressed what is "necessary", and you are engaging in the typical tactic of the left of focusing on fatal conditions that are very expensive while conveniently ignoring that the left ALSO wants free treatment for conditions that are far cheaper and/or far less likely to be fatal, and using this fear of "letting people die" as a bludgeon to get agreement.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

People will die no matter what Xeq. If people want to afford care for someone for only emotional reasons that is up to them. If people want to keep someone alive who is in pain because they have power of attorney and get a check for keeping the person alive - its immoral but its their decision so long as its their money.

Yes people will not be able to afford the care in a private system and die from it and people will be barred from some kinds of care due to price in a single payer system as well or die waiting in lines in order to cut costs.

This is the nature of a world with limited resources and acting like a **** child by pretending that these real physical limitations will go away if we only...the **** if I know what you think...."care hard enough"...or some hippie bullshit like that.

Death will always happen humans can't change that. Extortion and theft are human constructs and we can damn well do something about those. Stop trying to curse us by chasing an impossible pipe dream.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

You haven't given an example treatment. You've given an example grandstanding sob story. I note that you managed not to respond to my last post, but had to make a sideways comment in a response to DE. We actually don't know what's it reasonable to assume, because you can't provide any facts.

A question for you. How are you providing goods or services beyond what is physically possible?

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People can afford it now because of the requirement that employee group health plans cover these treatments. Someone with a preexisting condition can get a job and the government then mandates the insurer pay for their treatment.



I chose the example I did specifically because it's an example of a medical condition that private insurance can't cover. I mean, there are lots of expensive conditions that private insurance would handle fine. Cancer is expensive, but you can insure against that no problem because you don't know in advance who is going to get it and can then spread the risk. This one is present from birth and gives the afflicted individual no opportunity to insure against it ahead of time. If the treatment is not reasonably affordable by an individual, there is no way to deal with it other than taking money away from other people.



All I know for sure is what the treatment costs now. You are outright stating that under a free market system the same treatment will cost a small fraction of that price, yet cannot demonstrate why this is. You cannot simply assume the price will drop that much to make the treatment reasonably affordable.

I'm not sure where your "physically possible" argument comes from because it's clearly physically possible to provide the treatment now. It must therefore also be possible to provide it under any other system.

These health care plans are private, are they not? Why are you moving the goalposts to "pre-existing condition", anyhow?



You didn't show that private insurance can't cover it at all. You just provided a cost for an expensive but unspecified medical treatment and arbitrarily proclaimed the private/charity insurance can't over it.

Now you're just inventing problems that exist from birth, assigning an arbitrarily high cost to them, and claiming the only way to deal with them is taking money from others. I can think of no condition existing from birth that costs 6 figures a year to treat that does not ALSO have a very high probability of resulting in early death regardless of treatment.

Moreover, you still have not dealt with the fact that fatal problems that are hugely expensive are simply a tiny part of what's being demanded as necessary treatment.



In the same way you haven't demonstrated that private means can't cover these expenses?



It's not physically possible to provide any arbitrarily high amount of medical treatment to the population in general.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

But you don't know why. I think if you go back and read (and comprehend) what I have written, you will find I haven't stated that at all. As to what assumptions I can make, if I go by your standards, I can make whatever assumptions suit me. I haven't yet made any unwarranted assumptions. Every assumption I've made so far has been in line with the data I have available to me. I've provided price points for the injection at different dosage levels. One of those is a small fraction of the end cost you've quoted. Unfortunately, due to your complete lack of data, we can't tell if that's a valid cost or not.

As to the "physically possible", given that this treatment is dependent on the blood (and plasma) supply at any given time, that sets a boundary on how much is possibly available. If you have more people requiring the treatment than supply available, what happens? While this girl can currently be supplied with the treatment, how many more cannot? Even if you take money out of the equation, that won't change.

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Yes, but they still are subject to the government mandate that people with pre-existing conditions be accepted, one that presumably wouldn't exist under a free market health care system. And I'm not moving the goalposts. The whole thread I've been talking about a congenital defect that certainly would qualify as a pre-existing condition when someone goes to look for a job.



I haven't "invented" anything. You should read all my posts in the thread. I posted about a real medical condition (congenital B-cell dysfunction) that really currently costs $11k/month to treat. The condition is not likely to be fatal if treated, but almost guaranteed to be fatal if not.

Browser ate my lengthy reply, which I don't care to retype at this time. Let me go on record and say that "this person may need to do without it, and may die." It's always been my stance (well, since sometime in college, at least) that we've come to expect and feel entitled to too much when it comes to health care. It's an unsustainable model to expect a right to care. We'll end up exceeding our GDP in health care costs alone if we don't change that societal expectation. Think about it: You're placing the value of this person's life at 6.6 million of today's dollars (conservatively), and that sets a bar in a system where you declare that they're entitled to this. Can you turn down anybody else's treatment, if it's less than that? Is it fair to? Now, consider that you've just set the bar for a person's value at >2x the average lifetime earnings for an individual. Is that a sustainable policy?

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Yes. The government is going to pay for it all.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

With your tax dollars...