4 ms·

"curing aging" would actually INCREASE the cost of healthcare to nearly infinite.

• stcredzero 16y ago
  Not necessarily. http://www.sens.org/ http://www.sens.org/
• orangecat 16y ago
  Please explain. The average medical expenses of a 30 year old are vastly lower than for an 80 year old, and a successful cure for aging would give you the health of a 30 year old indefinitely.
  • ErrantX 16y ago
    Over a long enough lifespan the chance of contracting cancer approaches one. So we'd have to fix that too, for starters.
    • orangecat 16y ago
      Nah. Sure, even if you don't suffer from aging you'd still occasionally get diseases, and eventually one would be fatal, but your medical expenses per year would be far less than they are today.
      • ErrantX 16y ago
        Ok then, how about this. Obesity is a growing cause of illness. Removing aging is unlikely to affect that, arguably it could compound the problem.
        • orangecat 16y ago
          Potentially, although I'd expect that a person with the health of an obese 30 year old would still have lower medical expenses than a non-obese 60 year old. At any rate, obesity is a relatively easy problem compared to aging. (Step 1: stop subsidizing corn syrup...)
          • ErrantX 16y ago
            No it doesn't work like that; it's not the age, it is beig obese for a length of time. I'm not sure it is as easily fixable as your comment suggests - I'd argue it is as non-trivial as stopping aging.
        • jeffcoat 16y ago
          Careful, here: this is exactly what the argument would look like if you'd decided in advance what the right answer is, and you kept casting around for reasons why that's so until you find one that seems to stick.
          • ErrantX 16y ago
            Not at all I'm offering reasons - all pretty solid ones - why fixing aging wouldn't remove the cost of healthcare. The point was to show there are lots of other healthcare costs unrelated to aging. I'd argue it is the other poster who has become set on a theory. :-)
• Robin_Message 16y ago
  Dammit that is a ridiculous statement. No aging -> people still get sick occasionally -> it costs money to fix them -> it had better cost less than they earn between sicknesses, else they die Or, at the moment healthcare is O(1), based on a lifespan of N, but if the lifespan is extended radically, it will become O(N). So, if eliminating ageing causes N to tend to infinity, then I suppose healthcare costs will also tend to infinity. But then so will the accommodation costs, food costs, toothbrush costs, internet access... Healthcare looks like capex at the moment; if we lived much longer it'll look more like a variable cost.
• tjmaxal 16y ago
  say it costs a dollar per person each year to keep their bodies in perfect condition. without aging there is no death, no death means that the population will always grow or stagnate. $1/person/year Time becomes infinite, population is always positive there for no matter how small the cost they will always become infinite because time is infinite and population is a positive number.