Political Compass - Round Infinity

[Alorael at Large]

Of course. Many other countries have healthcare/insurance systems where most people can afford and get primary care. Those systems have their own problem, but I think it's telling that I don't know many Europeans who would trade their systems for ours.

 

—Alorael, who acknowledges degrees of separation bias. He knows there are many Americans who wouldn't trade the American system for any European one, but he doesn't know many of them. He knows mostly Americans who are keen on single-payer care and enthusiastic about Obamacare as a stopgap.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

The alternative to letting sick rich people fund advanced research is to do it with tax money. That's probably feasible, too; but I'm honestly not sure which is better. The tax route involves getting mostly healthy people to pay for developments that won't benefit them, so past a certain point people just become reluctant to pay. Sick rich people, in contrast, are happy to pay. Actually getting taxes out of people isn't as easy as you might think, it seems to me. You've got to keep them from cheating on their tax forms, or going black market, or just slacking off at work because their prospective after-tax benefit from working harder isn't worth it. So there's a lot to be said for a system that efficiently administers itself, the way charging sick rich people for advanced care does.

Keep in mind, I'm all for taxpayer funded research, which is a critical component and should probably make up the majority of funding- since the government simply has so much more money to spend than any private individual could possibly have. I just see no reason why we can't supplement the use of tax-funded public research with fee-funded private research- it's hard to argue that more research leading to more, better treatments is somehow a bad thing.

And, of course, private research has the additional advantage of all being perfectly voluntary. You'd be free to refuse to subsidize it by simply refusing advanced, expensive care- the Steve Jobs of the world would be free to turn up their nose at chemotherapy in favor of special Buddhist diets. They'd die, of course, but it would in the end be their choice to make in a way that taxes wouldn't.

[Student of Trinity]

Well, there's always an opportunity cost.*

 

Make it lucrative to develop expensive new cures for dread diseases, and then suddenly in addition to all the nobly motivated medical researchers you would get without the lucre, you get a whole bunch of greedier types of genius also being lured off into medical research, when they could have been building social networks and smartphone apps instead. And then all those rich people who manage to live a bit longer as a result, albeit not as richly as before they paid for their cures, will be bored to death.

[JamesMighty]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

Make it lucrative to develop expensive new cures for dread diseases, and then suddenly in addition to all the nobly motivated medical researchers you would get without the lucre, you get a whole bunch of greedier types of genius also being lured off into medical research, when they could have been building social networks and smartphone apps instead. And then all those rich people who manage to live a bit longer as a result, albeit not as richly as before they paid for their cures, will be bored to death.

Why not just NOT make it lucrative?

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

...you get a whole bunch of greedier types of genius also being lured off [...] when they could have been building social networks and smartphone apps instead.

Are you sure this is a bad thing?

(Also, doesn't medical research have plenty of the greedier types already? Or is there enough of a separation between medical research and biotechnology that they're only in biotech fields? Or is Dikiyoba completely off base here?)

[JamesMighty]

You are somewhat offbase

 

Si sono un po 'offbase

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

(Also, doesn't medical research have plenty of the greedier types already? Or is there enough of a separation between medical research and biotechnology that they're only in biotech fields? Or is Dikiyoba completely off base here?)

Until very recently, the go-to place for geniuses who wanted to make lots of money was Wall Street, not medical research. That may have changed somewhat since 2008, but there's still plenty of money to be made building stochastic risk models and doing analysis of derivatives if you feel like sitting in front of Excel for 100 hours a week.