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petdave -> Math is hard. i'd rather rant. (3/27/2007 8:24:20 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: ferryman777
Now, should you donate your organ/s you are fucking yourself. The actual cost of a life, is the resale value of your organs...what hospitals charge the reciepiants.
i've been told that i'm a cold-hearted SOB because i refuse to donate blood on the same principle... if i needed it from a hospital, i'd damned sure be charged for it, so why on earth would i give it away? It makes no sense.
The OP does raise a very interesting moral question, tho... i see liberals in some of the forums i frequent touting socialized medicine as though it were a magical cure-all, and roundly criticizing any hesitation to invoke ANY lifesaving measure... i always ask, when did they perfect faith healing? Because until that happens, human life will ALWAYS have a dollar value- it HAS to, because the resources required to save them are neither limitless nor free.
Of course, since someone brought up PJ O'Rourke, i'll paraphrase another bit of his philosophy that i admire...
1. If you're spending your own money on yourself, you choose the best compromise between quality and value
2. If you're spending other people's money on yourself, you choose the best quality, and value (cost) is no object
3. If you're spending your money on other people, quality will often take a backseat to value
4. And if you're spending other people's money on other people, then any damned thing will do, and to hell with what it costs.
All too many people think about .gov spending as category 2, when in practice, it's #4.
Where was i going with this?
Oh yes.
i will don the Nomex firesuit, and bravely proclaim that not all lives should be valued equally. An experienced cardiac surgeon with a half-million dollars or more worth of specialized education simply isn't worth as the same amount as a landscaper with a GED and a pack-a-day cigarette habit. The funds devoted to maintaining the "lives" of the irretrievably brain-damaged are not being put to good use.
Now, that's all from the medical care perspective, which is a bit of a digression. From the legislation perspective, things are murky, because there's so much speculation. Maybe 100 lives would be saved this year by the bathroom police. Maybe five of those people would instead slip on a wet sidewalk that same year. Maybe the bathroom gods will demand their sacrifice and take a dozen or so regardless of .gov's best efforts. It's all damned lies and statistics, especially once Congress starts getting numbers in from the Bathroom Safety Cable division of Halliburton Industries. i'd say, legislation-wise, average cost to save an estimated life, of no more than five bucks a head for a speculative lives/year benefit of 1000 or less. Once you start getting into things that have an appreciable body count- research into cancer, heart disease, etc., the numbers start going up.
And again, we're talking value here. .Gov seems to be fighting evolution tooth and nail by devoting the greatest resources to the least worthy. If we save twenty lives a year by adding a warning to sleeping pill bottles that says "warning: may cause drowsiness", the actual cost per life is likely to be miniscule. But then, not only will those people probably contribute little or nothing to society, but then they stand a better than average chance of being the same people whose lives are saved by the warning stickers on hair dryers that say not to use them in the shower. It's an endless cycle.
Math is hard.
...dave
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