Subject:
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Re: Rights to free goods? (was Re: What happened?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Sat, 3 Jul 1999 20:43:09 GMT
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Reply-To:
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lpieniazek@novera.comNOSPAM
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Viewed:
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1076 times
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Frank Filz wrote:
>
> Healthcare is definitely the toughest nut to crack here. The problem is that
> essentially for anyone in the world, there is a medical condition which
> would take more resources to treat than they themselves own (god knows what
> it would take to bankrupt Bill Gates, but even if he is "safe", I doubt
> there are more than a few hundred or thousant people in the world who would
> be "safe").
The one that will get Bill Gates is the one we can't cure yet. Same as
what got Princess Diana. We currently cannot save people that get
crushed to 1/2 their volume and aren't extricated and gotten to the
hospital that very instant. It did not matter if Diana had all the money
in the entire world, there just was no way to save her available to us.
There are lots of other deaths that cannot be prevented. Some swift,
some not so swift. It's the not so swift ones that sucker us into
spending a lot of resources on a hopeless cause. Everyone dies
eventually, remember.
I refrained from commenting on John C.s situation at the time. But I
thought about it some more and it seems to me that, cold and heartless
as it might be, we're STILL just dealing with scarce resource
allocation. Utilitiarian: To use infinite heroic measures to save one
person may not be a good use of societal resources. How much is a life
worth? Who gets to decide?
While a universal health care system may do a good job of ensuring
everyone gets treated when they're hit by a bus, although I doubt it, I
have very strong doubts that it will do a good job at deciding the
harder ones. And mark my words, the decisions will be made, but they
will be by faceless bureacrats.
I'd rather make the decision myself now, in advance, thusly: Spend no
more to try to save me than my health insurance covers, plus X, where X
is a *relatively small* percentage of my total net worth. No heroic
measures please. I love my family too much to wish poverty on them
individually because they spent resourcs on me that would have been
better spent on me.
And I love my country(1) too much to wish poverty on it collectively
because it squanders resources on hopeless causes or foolish fixes. Let
people decide for themselves.
My life is definitely not worth more than 5M to me or to my family.
> What this means is that we need the ability to pool our resources to share
> the risk. That means that the healthy people need to participate.
Agreed. But the pooling must be proportional to the risk. As long as we
do not allow insurance companies to charge MORE for riskier people, they
will instead maneuver underhandedly to exclude them completely.
I snipped most of the rest of Frank's append because I mostly agree with
it, he's on the right track.
1 - That's right Jeff Stembel... I love this place even while I rabble
rouse.
--
Larry Pieniazek larryp@novera.com http://my.voyager.net/lar
- - - Web Application Integration! http://www.novera.com
fund Lugnet(tm): http://www.ebates.com/ Member ref: lar, 1/2 $$ to
lugnet.
NOTE: I have left CTP, effective 18 June 99, and my CTP email
will not work after then. Please switch to my Novera ID.
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