5 ms·

It is quite dystopian how much of our productive capacity is geared towards making people less sick.

• dsacco 9y ago
  Interesting, I have the opposite reaction; it seems virtually utopian to me (especially if you define "sick" broadly).
• xapata 9y ago
  Why? Healthcare is a luxury good. As you have more income, you spend more on health.
• allendoerfer 9y ago
  It is one of the steps towards singularity, which have immediate positive effects on the people currently alive.
• lsc 9y ago
  See, the problem with healthcare is not that it is expensive. I think it's completely reasonable to spend a very large portion of our GDP on healthcare. Why not call it a defense program? hell, disease has always killed more people than war. (was world war two the only time period where that wasn't true?) The problem is that healthcare is unaffordable to people who aren't in the top 10%. We can solve this through redistribution. It seems that for research, this should be obvious. Most of the cost of research is pretty similar if you sell 100 or one billion units. In those cases especially, there's no reason not to collect the money that people are willing or able to pay and then give the advance to everyone, if you have a mechanism for doing that without reducing the money you collect. But, the point here is that if we curtail basic research because we amortize the cost evenly over the consumers of healthcare, that hurts the rich, too... because that means we don't get as many medical advances. (of course, doctor patient interactions don't scale so well; that will require redistribution, and perhaps even a lower tier of care.) Really, I think this is similar to the education problem. Spending less on education seems... like a poor long term decision. But it is unaffordable to the poor, so subsidies may be in order.