[ExI] Petitioning the British Prime Minister

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 03/12/2007, Tom Nowell <nebathenemi at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

>  As Britain has a sixty-year history of heavily
> socialised medicine, and one of the big moral issues
> facing transhumanism is around access to future
> genetic technologies, I decided to grab the bull by
> the horns and set up a petition demanding that
> Britain's healthcare service provides equal access to
> genetic treatments eg for parkinsons and for future
> babies, when such technologies are proved safe.

Why do you assume that the healthcare system won't use such
technologies? History suggests that every medical technology that
works eventually is used. Very expensive treatments are sometimes
justified on political grounds, but more often they are justified on
the grounds that they will decrease overall expenditure by, for
example, reducing costs associated with hospitalisation of the
chronically ill. (Killing the chronically ill would be cheaper still,
but fortunately that's politically unacceptable, even for the worst
dictatorships).




-- 
Stathis Papaioannou