3 ms·

Utilitarian cynism at its best. The humanitarian approach is to save that one live AND improve the other 100 as well. We can afford to do so, because those exp

• lazyasciiart 4y ago
  They really aren't that rare, and the reason we don't help all of them is not because of a utilitarian decision not to spend money on public healthcare. If you can get your humanitarianism to move that money from corn subsidies and fighter jets to health spending, more power to you.
  • autoexec 4y ago
    > They really aren't that rare, 3,100 cases a year in all of Europe, and 3,600 cases a year in the entire US. That's pretty damn rare really. And it's a genetic condition, which means we should be working to eradicate the problem entirely by screening parents and gene editing ideally making it both rare and increasingly rare from here out.
    • lazyasciiart 4y ago
      It didn't occur to me that you were talking about this specific condition, rather than the set of conditions that will be plausibly treated this way.
• concordDance 4y ago
  This isn't actually true. There are thousands of underfunded causes right now, from rare disease research to homeless treatment programs to education of disabled kids. If you're spending $4 million on this you're either raising taxes again (and government expenditure is already roughly 50% of gdp in most developed European countries, cant go much higher without destroying the thing thats making the taxes) or you're not rehabilitating 5 homeless people, educating 5 special needs kids and discovering a potential new treatment for 1 rare disease.