the point is that in a fair world, the cure for your condition would eventually be found and produced but in your world, it wouldn't hence you will be paying more and more for healthcare as the number of potential conditions you could have grows
Fairness
Only rich people will get it. (no tech has ever done this.)
Already, modern medicine expands lifetime and in particularly healthy lifetime significantly and the richer you are the more of it you can access.
Like, I don't have the same chances to get to 70 and still feel alright as someone born today in Bangladesh, or Zambia.
The world is already very unfair, and the only solution to that is to make it more fair, not to avoid developing treatments that, if the world was fair, would benfit everyone.
Less information -> more fairness. The bleak future isn't there when it does not affect you but for people with pre-existing conditions (and that's a fair number) it just got a little bleaker. (Because having some life-long health issue is already bleak enough by my reckoning and such people should be aided rather than hindered in having an otherwise as normal life as possible. It's a lottery, no point in penalizing the losers even further.)
The point is that exactly the life-threatening/prolonging tasks are the hugely expensive 'unlimited' things that we can't afford for everyone.
We can easily afford to heal collar bones, cataracts, flu, hernias, and a whole bunch of nonlethal issues for everyone regardless of ability to pay - wherever there are common, simple procedures that are done once to cure the problem permanently.
We can't afford to do top of line cancer or heart treatments to everyone all the time - because often a successful treatment will simply mean that you'll need another, more complex treatment in a year or five; and again, and again, until you have a society where 100% of people work in medicine.
Why would it cost $1M for everyone? Not everyone has a disease or an accident. And if we were all greatly diseased at the same time, the price tag would be the least of our worry.
Fewer people dying and more people overpaying for ineffective treatment is potentially a good tradeoff. As a society we already funnel massive amounts of cash to new medical treatments, we just do it in a really inefficient way.
Who suffers the most from age-related disease? The rich or the poor? Are novel medical treatments forever only available to the rich, or do they become ever cheaper, more widespread, and more effective over time? How much of your own personal future are you willing to sacrifice to spite rich people who might get access to early, inefficient technologies before you do? How much of everyone else's future are you willing to sacrifice to make yourself feel better? Think about it before answering.
Access to “high end” care (which I suppose would be one) is already high cost which is not that accessible even with technology presence.
As of 2019 1/3 of world’s population doesn’t have access to clean drinking water. Would they be glad that instead of clean water and sanitary conditions they were granted endless life?
It’s nice to focus on optimistic outcomes but except for genius scientists world is full of mobsters, greedy bankers and ruthless corporation heads. They’d had a chance for longevity way sooner than the best of scientists (who have “infinite memory” trait, which isn’t true even for the healthiest of humans).
Sure, we’re speculating (and it’s fun) but I’d invite to mix at least 30% of “what could go wrong” as part of the context.
Let’s have a thought experiment: who would be the first to get such treatment - Nobel prize winner or a dictator? What would be the route, who would pay for that, would they even want that (as that’s not guaranteed).
Only for the patient and only in the immediate term. But if you could increase your wealth by more than the cost of the cure by living longer, then you could say dying is more expensive. And the same for society, if your future contributions (taxes and others) are worth more than the cost of the cure.
And you have fallen into a different statistics trap. The number that matters isn't the cost of treating the patient. What matters is the increased lifetime costs of a paticular disease over the average. We all have to die of something. Diseases like lung cancer are cheap. The patients are either cured or dead relatively quickly. Demential is slow. Costs pile on for decades, starting often with forced early retirement long before formal medical costs are noticed. But we still have to normalize for the fact that, be it cancer, heart disease or dementia, most all of us will eventually need expensive care for some number of years.
Note that it is not sufficient to merely say "if you have condition X, it's better to have caught it early", because that ignores (a) the cost of testing all the people who don't have condition X for that condition and (b) the cost when widespread testing leads to false positives which cause one to think the patient has condition X leading to treatment which produces needless expense, disability and/or death.
Every time you take your car in for an inspection the mechanic is likely to find things that are wrong and need fixing; ditto for taking your body in for a check-up. But on the margin, medicine is just about as likely to make you less healthy as more healthy, so being prescribed more of it is not a clear win. (see the Rand study, MRFIT, and so on)
Most diseases have some human choices involved. Living in a city with bad smoke, not running every day, poor diet, or drinking.
Maybe you're perfect and run every day, living in the country side, only eat fruits and vegetable and have never had a cigarette or beer your entire life.
But most of us aren't perfect. And honestly if you are the perfect specimen you are going to cost society far more because everyone dies of something. And slowly dying of alzheimer's disease in your late 90's is way more expensive because you'll live in in a nursing home with full time care for your last ten year and you've been using medicare and social security for 30 years.
Dying in your 50's from lung cancer is it's own punishment.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but this post makes it sound like you've created an efficient API to find whether or not a person can "afford" treatment.
Again, maybe (hopefully) I've misunderstood. And not to be the the tree-hugging idealist of the post, but as a fellow human, how does this make life better for the rest of us?
Sorry if I seem confrontational about the whole thing; progress usually is a good thing. That said, I hate seeing great intelligence spent wholly on the bottom line.
I'm also aware that I very likely am in the wrong forest barking up the wrong tree...
Prevention is better than cure... I don't find this price surprising unfortunately. A strong social security net and healthcare for all would cost much less to society and cause less suffering.
Not presuming that might focus your current priorities in life if you think the tech is reasonably likely to come about before it's too late for you and be expensive for a long time, like you may want to focus more on getting a higher paying job, more frequently asking for raises, or switching companies to make more money, better controlling your spending and trying to save/invest more wisely...
There's a moral argument I could make that suggests even with high costs lots of people would get it anyway out of a sense of civilizational fairness, or a history-of-technology argument I could make about tech getting cheaper over time, but I think the argument I like best and that works on its own is just pointing out that there's a huge economic incentive to government and society more broadly to provide such technology to everyone even for free (from their individual perspective at time of treatment).
On the production side is the incentive of having healthy citizens who don't have to stop working on account of age. There's something like 16% of the population just in the US who are older than 65, something like 20% of them are still working, and some of those not working would be more than happy to go back to working but can't because of age-related issues (the final one being death). Adding some of them back to the economy would be a nice boost worth paying a lot for.
From the spending side, currently governments subsidize medical treatment for lots of people, sometimes even for everyone and even for brand new technologies like mRNA vaccines. There's a huge network of so-called insurance providers which also play into this; some things are fully covered by a plan while others are subject to more complicated rules. The dynamics of how money actually flows around and who really pays for what are complicated but society as a whole is currently paying a lot of money for the benefit of individuals. So we can expect longevity treatments to be subsidized and affordable for some people to some extent because that's the case with every other medical treatment. We can expect it to be a large number of people, trending towards everyone, and heavily subsidized if not otherwise affordable, trending towards free (from the individual perspective), because of the nature of the 'disease' (age affects everyone, like a global pandemic) and the consequences of treating it or not. We already know the consequences of not treating aging, and a lot about their expenses. So much is spent just on end-of-life care (for US Medicare alone, 13%-25% of its budget is spent during recipients' last year of life) let alone all the age-related issues leading up to that. The government or society more broadly spending money on individuals now for otherwise unaffordable rejuvenation tech can make a lot of sense when the alternative is spending a lot more money on them not too much later for unaffordable end-of-life care.
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