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No small part of it could be that our parents generation did not have the means to spend $1mm in resources to keep an old man alive for 8 months longer coupled

No small part of it could be that our parents generation did not have the means to spend $1mm in resources to keep an old man alive for 8 months longer coupled with the dangerous idea that everyone might be entitled to those last 8 months no matter what they did in their lives leading up to that point. This seems to me like the huge, looming problem our generation will have to solve.

potatolicious 14y ago
> "the dangerous idea that everyone might be entitled to those last 8 months no matter what they did in their lives leading up to that point." Are you suggesting that the amount of medical resources expended to keep an individual alive/healthy should be keenly judged on an individual basis, based on some arbitrary notion of "worthiness", by some authority? Would this hypothetical authority be called a "death panel"? It would seem very fitting.
- Tichy 14y ago
  I think eventually some kind of "cutoff" point will have to be defined. I imagine that in the future it may be possible to keep people "alive" indefinitely while attached to expensive machines. So the costs may well be infinitely high. In the UK I heard you don't get Dialysis after a certain age, which I always found quite shocking. But some equivalent of that will probably happen everywhere :-( Also the worthiness of the previous comment probably referred to people actively ruining their health. That could be seen as freeloading off society.
- noonespecial 14y ago
  I didn't propose any solution at all. Merely point out that it will be a very difficult problem indeed. Technology seems to be bringing us to a point where indefinite life extension is possible at exponentially increasing cost. Eventually the simple reality will be that there are more people whose lives could be extended than can be extended, even with our entire economic output allocated to that purpose. We correctly recoil in horror at the thought of "fair and impartial" authorities rationing those resources because we instinctively know that once government gets involved, those decisions will be anything but fair and impartial. At the same time, it doesn't seem that the free market as it is now will perform any better because health care is a completely inelastic good and the "free" has been riddled with monopoly and regulatory capture. Either way, right now it looks like the rich and influential win disproportionately at the dire expense of the less well off. This is the big looming problem. It's a deep rabbit hole, but the point is, it's a tough puzzle. It might take moral mettle equal to or even greater than winning a global war against a genocidal madman bent on world domination to solve it. We've got our work cut out for us and then some.

potatolicious 14y ago

> "the dangerous idea that everyone might be entitled to those last 8 months no matter what they did in their lives leading up to that point." Are you suggesting that the amount of medical resources expended to keep an individual alive/healthy should be keenly judged on an individual basis, based on some arbitrary notion of "worthiness", by some authority? Would this hypothetical authority be called a "death panel"? It would seem very fitting.

Tichy 14y ago
I think eventually some kind of "cutoff" point will have to be defined. I imagine that in the future it may be possible to keep people "alive" indefinitely while attached to expensive machines. So the costs may well be infinitely high. In the UK I heard you don't get Dialysis after a certain age, which I always found quite shocking. But some equivalent of that will probably happen everywhere :-( Also the worthiness of the previous comment probably referred to people actively ruining their health. That could be seen as freeloading off society.
noonespecial 14y ago
I didn't propose any solution at all. Merely point out that it will be a very difficult problem indeed. Technology seems to be bringing us to a point where indefinite life extension is possible at exponentially increasing cost. Eventually the simple reality will be that there are more people whose lives could be extended than can be extended, even with our entire economic output allocated to that purpose. We correctly recoil in horror at the thought of "fair and impartial" authorities rationing those resources because we instinctively know that once government gets involved, those decisions will be anything but fair and impartial. At the same time, it doesn't seem that the free market as it is now will perform any better because health care is a completely inelastic good and the "free" has been riddled with monopoly and regulatory capture. Either way, right now it looks like the rich and influential win disproportionately at the dire expense of the less well off. This is the big looming problem. It's a deep rabbit hole, but the point is, it's a tough puzzle. It might take moral mettle equal to or even greater than winning a global war against a genocidal madman bent on world domination to solve it. We've got our work cut out for us and then some.