"I always like to remind people that effectively treating heart disease is going to involve a significant period in which us normals have to deal with long-lived rich people. Sounds awful, like, just about the worst societal dynamic I can think of."
[Back to the present]
Our age is characterized by the fact that access to types of medical technology is basically flat. Rich people get to hire better doctors, but there are no super-secret, ultra-restricted forms of medicine that are inaccessible to everyone else. Your chances of getting into clinical trials of the new new things are about as good as theirs, provided you are prepared to pick up a phone and put in the time.
I don't think that's true. To take one example, Steve Jobs famously gamed the organ donor system by buying houses in many states in order to get on multiple statewide registries. Now, most medical treatments aren't zero-sum in the way of organ transplants, but let's not pretend rich people can't buy better health than the rest of us.
Sure they can, but I think of it as rich people subsidizing the medical research for the rest of us. It trickles down, and as the progress continues, there's always another new expensive thing for rich people to pay for.
As for the organ transplants; somebody needs to pour more money into stem cell research and related fields so that we can start growing organs, thus eliminating the whole organ market (including the black one) and zero-sum dynamics of transplats.
What about the effects of over population? Predictions of food, water and clean air shortages don't seem to lend themselves to an even distribution of nano bio-technology.
"I always like to remind people that effectively treating heart disease is going to involve a significant period in which us normals have to deal with long-lived rich people. Sounds awful, like, just about the worst societal dynamic I can think of."
[Back to the present]
Our age is characterized by the fact that access to types of medical technology is basically flat. Rich people get to hire better doctors, but there are no super-secret, ultra-restricted forms of medicine that are inaccessible to everyone else. Your chances of getting into clinical trials of the new new things are about as good as theirs, provided you are prepared to pick up a phone and put in the time.