> Finally, what is the point here? An more economically "equal" society, or a society where people like me don't die waiting in line for care? I stridently advocate for the latter.
So only the amount of economic value a person can produce should decide the value of the persons life, is that what you are saying? The more money you have, the more your life is worth? This kind of neoliberal ideology sounds absolutely horrible to me. Just because you have the ability to produce more than some other person doesn't mean that your life is more important. What you are experiencing now with the wait is nothing compared to what poor people would have to endure in the system you advocate.
What you are experiencing now with the wait is nothing compared to what poor people would have to endure in the system you advocate.
First, you do realize that not everyone that goes into the hospital today comes back out alive, right? There are a lot of things medicine can't yet cure - today - for any price.
Second, if you block high-priced medical advances, you are also blocking the low-priced ones that inevitably follow in a free market.
Just as UNIX workstations sold for tens of thousands in the early 1990s, and were supplanted by desktop computers costing a tenth as much in the following decade, expensive medical technology would become cheap quickly under freedom.
We haven't seen this happen with most of medicine because of the controls placed on it. For example, I learned (via this thread) of a new machine that administers anesthesia. Its use would make my biopsy $1800 cheaper, in addition to reducing my wait time (you can't have an endoscopy without general anesthesia): https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/new-machine-...
This device was ready to go six years ago, but the FDA rejected it initially (under pressure from anesthesiologists). Three years later, after much foot-dragging, it finally approved it. And yet today it's not available in most places because the American Society of Anesthesiologists lobbied hard for a "narrow indication" and "restrictive guidelines."
Note that it's not up me or my doctor as to whether or not I might opt-in to this. Nor is it even a choice that can be made by any of the local hospitals around me (I would shop around if it would help, believe me!) What happened here is a direct and inevitable consequence of regulatory control over which innovations are permitted to enter medical use. (The only tool the government has in regulatory matters is more regulation or less. Therefore there is no way to prevent regulatory capture in a mixed economy except to steadily de-control it.)
What good is it to me that the device has been vetted more? Every minute I wait allows my condition to worsen, increasing my risk of death.
The facts I've outlined here are not just some "neoliberal ideology" intended to offend you. This is a thing that I (and hundreds of thousands of other people like me) need desperately. All I'm advocating for is a society that recognizes the life-saving role of freedom in medicine. And I'm advocating for that only because nothing else could possibly work.
You can't just throw your hands up in the air and say "to heck with early adopters, they shouldn't be allowed to pay more to be a year ahead!" If the government forced all the tech companies to do that, tech would be about as slow to improve as medicine currently is. This is because there would be no money put into the right hands (and it is a constantly changing group of people and organizations), at the right time to make the technology steadily improve.
I don't have enough knowledge in this area to say if the current regulations have done any good, but I'm sure there are legitimate reasons for those regulations in many cases.
But my problem isn't really with freedom in the medical field, I can support that if it really saves more lives. What I don't agree with is the way you propose to make this freedom happen. Determining who is worth saving and who is not by the amount of money they have is something I can't support, and it's what would happen with a free market approach. You say that is the only way to achieve what you want, but I don't believe so. We could increase public funding, for example.
By the way, have you looked into getting what you need from abroad?
So only the amount of economic value a person can produce should decide the value of the persons life, is that what you are saying? The more money you have, the more your life is worth? This kind of neoliberal ideology sounds absolutely horrible to me. Just because you have the ability to produce more than some other person doesn't mean that your life is more important. What you are experiencing now with the wait is nothing compared to what poor people would have to endure in the system you advocate.