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If you can't provide enough value to society that you can spare a few tens of thousands of dollars to cure yourself, are you really worth the cost of developing
by tedks 11y ago
If you can't provide enough value to society that you can spare a few tens of thousands of dollars to cure yourself, are you really worth the cost of developing these drugs, testing them, training doctors, etc.?
All of this over-regulation is why medicine is declining in the first place. That shouldn't justify more regulation.
- knieveltech 11y agoThat easily makes the top 3 list of most sociopathic things I've read all month, and between mass shootings and debates about refugees it's been a banner month for sociopaths on Facebook. Did you intend to measure the value of a human life in terms of enhancing shareholder value or is this just poorly worded?
- mystikal 11y agoSome people are only able to reason about things they can measure.
- refurb 11y agoLet's ignore profit for a minute. These drugs still cost money to discover and produce. Who pays for it? We put a price on human life all the time, not just for drugs.
- knieveltech 11y agoAgreed and I find this utterly appalling. For me this is a damning indictment of capitalism and a clear indicator that there has to be a better way to handle task prioritization and resource allocation in a modern society.
- refurb 11y agoIs there any system where you can avoid it? Even in a command economy system trade offs have to be made. If you have resources X to spend, you need to figure out what to spend it on. That means you're putting a dollar figure on a human life. I don't see how it could be avoided.
- knieveltech 11y agoI don't claim to have answers and would definitely support experimentation in this arena. Political systems are certainly ripe for disruption.
- aninhumer 11y agoThe point of providing value to society in the first place is so that people can experience the benefit of it.
- venomsnake 11y ago> If you can't extract enough value from society so that you can spare a few tens of thousands of dollars to cure yourself Fixed. I also generally feel casual disregard towards human life and suffering as long as the human in question is not me, but lets call things with their real names. With a price of drug per year being twice the average income in the richest country in the world - that creates impossible situation by definition for half of its populace. Also value provided is not always correlated with value extracted - a janitor for a modest fee keeps my house clean. A hedge fund manager ruins the global economy just when I must enter my prime growing years in earnings and make sure I am at a disadvantage at both the cohort before and after me. Which of those two lives is more valuable to me?
- _0ffh 11y ago"With a price of drug per year being twice the average income in the richest country in the world - that creates impossible situation by definition for half of its populace." Even worse. There are a few gigantic outliers at the upper end of the scale. That means that the number of people below average income will be >50%. What you want to check against in such cases is the median (50:50 split by definition). "Also value provided is not always correlated with value extracted" That is exactly one of the main problems society is struggling with. How do we even measure value provided? It's a subjective measure to begin with. In the case of the hedge funds manager, it's probably net-negative for most people (but I'm sure her friends would disagree).