5 ms·

> There are diseases (including cancer) we could easily spend millions per patient on. Pulling out all the stops you could spend 10s of millions. But we really

by grecy 6y ago

> There are diseases (including cancer) we could easily spend millions per patient on. Pulling out all the stops you could spend 10s of millions. But we really don't have that kind of societal overabundance, not yet. My Mum in Australia had a rare and aggressive form of lung cancer, discovered at stage four. She had almost three years of radiation, chemo, all the associated drugs, scans, treatments and even two different trial drugs. She never paid a cent, all of it on Australia's standard "heathcare for all". If Australia and many other countries can manage it, then more countries can too. Anything less is just an excuse.

fastball 6y ago
The calculus is still not that simple. What if that economic output could've instead been directed towards better education for children, or reducing the use of something which is known to cause cancer in the first place (e.g. coal power plants)? The decision is simple for you, because it's your mom. The decision is not a simple one for a society. We do not yet live in a post-scarcity world. Spending on one thing by necessity means less spending on something else.
- chadcmulligan 6y ago
  Australia has free education as well, and optional private education. University is paid but fairly reasonable, and there's a loan system, though it could be better imho.
  - fastball 6y ago
    I'm sure you could find ways to spend more money and increase the quality of that free education, no?
    - chadcmulligan 6y ago
      Improvements are always possible, and on ongoing discussion. Though I have no major complaints with the current system, my kids are finished school and so I pay less attention now. There was a "Gonski report" commissioned a few years ago with enhancements in mind, it's the source of ongoing discussions I believe. Edit: if you don't like it you can always pay for private education - it to is partially government funded.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  We create a lot of the scarcity that exists in the states not so we can spend more on enriching society but so we can enrich a minority at the expense of society. Your argument is only sound in the hypothetical case.
  - fastball 6y ago
    My argument is "we don't live in a post-scarcity society, not even close". This is objectively true. There is nothing hypothetical about it.
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      We are objectively wealthy enough that everyone could have a place to live, enough food to eat, free medical care even to the point of expensive cancer treatment, free education if so much of our resources weren't directed towards enriching so few without sacrificing essential items. Even calculations about what is and isn't a reasonable expenditure are inherently polluted with the presumption that the current cost structure is an immutable condition as opposed to being the result of a system designed by the worlds dumbest,greediest,least worthy democracy to ever exist. To clarify what I'm trying to say is that because of the nature of physics warmth which is to say energy is a scarce quantity and will always be so but in the context of making sure everyone is warm its almost always very simple there actually IS enough to go around despite it being scarce. The same thing is true of food. We cannot afford infinite degrees of effort per patient but what we can afford is more than what most would consider sufficient.
      - Frondo 6y ago
        For one of those -- homelessness -- the costs to society for not housing everyone exceed what it'd take to simply give everyone some fixed shelter. We still give medical care to homeless people, we jail them (at costs far greater than housing would be), we offer a variety of social programs that aren't housing, and it all adds up to much more than they had a stable place to live. We'd be jailing fewer of them, and their health care needs would be less if they weren't exposed to the elements through rough sleeping night after night. Why don't we? Because of so many people who point out the unfairness of someone who's not working at all getting housing for free from the government, when so many working people are struggling to house themselves. So there's perhaps other unfairness at work there that people are unwilling to look at how solve (why is housing so expensive, relative to wages? why do we expect people to work 2-3 jobs and have no leisure time, no time to relax, just to satisfy the basic needs of survival?), and that alone seems to have boxed people into a system where we're jailing people and leaving them out in the elements, even though it costs us all more in the long run. Where health care is concerned, what bothers me most is how outrageously expensive US care is for its outcomes, compared to every other western nation. That doesn't seem right, and doesn't seem like a good use of our society's money or human effort, expending so much money on systems that could easily be made unnecessary -- like medical billing and the mass of health care insurers. (And then I had an ex whose father is a doctor, a GP, who lived a very nice life, and insisted that he deserved that...when I asked him what he thought about how doctors in other countries aren't so richly compensated, he only responded, "hey I went to med school, I deserve this," and he too couldn't conceive of a different ordering of things, because...I'm guessing here...his mind went to the couple of new cars in the driveway of his massive house in a tony suburb of an expensive east coast city, and how, had he had less, he might have just one new car instead of two...but that's a speculation on my part. I wasn't inside his head.)

by grecy 6y ago

fastball 6y ago

The calculus is still not that simple. What if that economic output could've instead been directed towards better education for children, or reducing the use of something which is known to cause cancer in the first place (e.g. coal power plants)? The decision is simple for you, because it's your mom. The decision is not a simple one for a society. We do not yet live in a post-scarcity world. Spending on one thing by necessity means less spending on something else.

chadcmulligan 6y ago
Australia has free education as well, and optional private education. University is paid but fairly reasonable, and there's a loan system, though it could be better imho.
- fastball 6y ago
  I'm sure you could find ways to spend more money and increase the quality of that free education, no?
  - chadcmulligan 6y ago
    Improvements are always possible, and on ongoing discussion. Though I have no major complaints with the current system, my kids are finished school and so I pay less attention now. There was a "Gonski report" commissioned a few years ago with enhancements in mind, it's the source of ongoing discussions I believe. Edit: if you don't like it you can always pay for private education - it to is partially government funded.
michaelmrose 6y ago
We create a lot of the scarcity that exists in the states not so we can spend more on enriching society but so we can enrich a minority at the expense of society. Your argument is only sound in the hypothetical case.
- fastball 6y ago
  My argument is "we don't live in a post-scarcity society, not even close". This is objectively true. There is nothing hypothetical about it.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    We are objectively wealthy enough that everyone could have a place to live, enough food to eat, free medical care even to the point of expensive cancer treatment, free education if so much of our resources weren't directed towards enriching so few without sacrificing essential items. Even calculations about what is and isn't a reasonable expenditure are inherently polluted with the presumption that the current cost structure is an immutable condition as opposed to being the result of a system designed by the worlds dumbest,greediest,least worthy democracy to ever exist. To clarify what I'm trying to say is that because of the nature of physics warmth which is to say energy is a scarce quantity and will always be so but in the context of making sure everyone is warm its almost always very simple there actually IS enough to go around despite it being scarce. The same thing is true of food. We cannot afford infinite degrees of effort per patient but what we can afford is more than what most would consider sufficient.
    - Frondo 6y ago
      For one of those -- homelessness -- the costs to society for not housing everyone exceed what it'd take to simply give everyone some fixed shelter. We still give medical care to homeless people, we jail them (at costs far greater than housing would be), we offer a variety of social programs that aren't housing, and it all adds up to much more than they had a stable place to live. We'd be jailing fewer of them, and their health care needs would be less if they weren't exposed to the elements through rough sleeping night after night. Why don't we? Because of so many people who point out the unfairness of someone who's not working at all getting housing for free from the government, when so many working people are struggling to house themselves. So there's perhaps other unfairness at work there that people are unwilling to look at how solve (why is housing so expensive, relative to wages? why do we expect people to work 2-3 jobs and have no leisure time, no time to relax, just to satisfy the basic needs of survival?), and that alone seems to have boxed people into a system where we're jailing people and leaving them out in the elements, even though it costs us all more in the long run. Where health care is concerned, what bothers me most is how outrageously expensive US care is for its outcomes, compared to every other western nation. That doesn't seem right, and doesn't seem like a good use of our society's money or human effort, expending so much money on systems that could easily be made unnecessary -- like medical billing and the mass of health care insurers. (And then I had an ex whose father is a doctor, a GP, who lived a very nice life, and insisted that he deserved that...when I asked him what he thought about how doctors in other countries aren't so richly compensated, he only responded, "hey I went to med school, I deserve this," and he too couldn't conceive of a different ordering of things, because...I'm guessing here...his mind went to the couple of new cars in the driveway of his massive house in a tony suburb of an expensive east coast city, and how, had he had less, he might have just one new car instead of two...but that's a speculation on my part. I wasn't inside his head.)