[extropy-chat] QALY pharmacoeconomics
Lifespan Pharma/Morris Johnson CTO
megao at sasktel.net
Sun Dec 18 23:37:32 UTC 2005
Questions I'd like to pose for discussion:
How to determine QALY (Quality Adjusted Life Year) values for
preventative medical use of natural health products.
Is there any published work to use?
How to compare these to known QALY values for crisis managment
treatment measures which are used once a condition
develops.
This would be complicated by the comparison of 2 separate age groups and
health states (young and healthy for preventative, aged and disease
prone or with active disease for crisis management) and the uncertainty
of whether
a predicted future cost would happen , which future cost to compare to
or how to justify using a specific future cost to compare with.
Health care rationing can be in the form of waiting times during which
future disease progresses from very long term X moderate cost , easily
treatable OR more
costly crisis X long term continued management OR less total cost ,
high cost short term palliative end-stage care.
Without such cost estimates public funders can argue they lack
information to make decisions to cover or refuse to cover dietary or
nutraceutical preventative health care measures.
Also of note is the contention that authorities sometimes try to
dissallow access by regulatory or liability means to those willing to
pay personally
for experimental or unproven unconventional drugs or treatments.
If a public system refuses to pay and the individual pays can the
public system interfere with a market driven
exchange of services or products between a willing buyer and a willing
seller?
The rights of the patient to determine what measures they wish are the
exact opposite of the patient's right to decline
treament or even intentionally undertake measures to damage theit health
status. If living wills and refusal of treatment
are not a crime how can the exact opposite be denied or abstructed by
regulators and lawmakers?
For example:
A patient who is extremely wealthy (say billionaire Ray Kurzeil or Bill
Gates) decides that after 20 years of smoking (a ficticious statement in
the case of the 2 named individuals) to have extensive body scans done.
He pays to have these on demand by leasing his own MRI.
He then hires a clinic and doctor (by bringing to to North America a
doctor from a chinese hospital where these procedures are a practice)
to privately to inject liquid nitrogen into precancerous lung tissue to
prevent future cancer.
He pays an herbalist practitioner to formulate and compound for
consumption numerous herbals and off-lable Rx medications to regenerate
damaged tissues.
He then finishes by renting a hyperbaric diving decompression chamber
(hyperbaric hydrogen therapy) for a month to
scavange any missed cancer or pre-cancer.
It is given in this case that a person like Ray Kurzweil who is a
billionaire who already spends well over a million dollars a year to
prevent diseases
and aging processes he only knows might be statisically possible if
faced by the above history would not balk over the
4-10 million dollar personal expenditure of tax paid dollars over a year
to carry out the above.
Would authorities use numerous regulatory and other legal means to deny
access to someone who demands to
not be interfered with as he directs and pays for all these activities
and services?
I am posing the case that not only might health care be rationed by
denial of already available conventional services
but might also be denied by indirect means.
In the context of the attached thesis can a free society act to deny the
above health care personal actions without
infringing on the constitutional rights of the citizen to own and
control their body just like any other piece of personal property
under the Property Rights provision of the Charter Of Rights?
The attachment, a 100 page thesis is forwarded by separate message as
it may not pass the spam/file-size or other filters of some of you.
Morris Johnson
mfj.eav at gmail.com
306-447-4944
Box 10 Beaubier, Sk. Canada
S0C-0H0
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