[ExI] Medical Costs

[Fred C. Moulton]

I have yet another small request.

If we are going to have a long drawn out debate on medical costs then
would all of the participants please use some common sense and provide
the details and background for the various data sets that will almost
inevitably be tossed around.

In particular it is useful to document the nature of what you want the
health care system to do and the nature of the persons involved.  Define
the inputs, the outputs, all of the relevant parameters and the criteria
used for making a decision.

A small example:  Two people each have the same model (same year) of
Toyota Corolla.  Person A in takes Car A to Pat's Garage and pays $100
and leaves with a car that gets 30 MPG.  Person B takes Car B to Chris's
Garage and pays $200 and leaves with a car that gets 25 MPG.  Which
garage is getter?  Well it depends on the condition of the cars when
they came in for one thing.  Both Car A and Car B might have been weel
maintained or Car A might have been well maintained and Car B neglected
or the reverse or both might have been neglected.  So if you are going
to do a comparison then it makes sense to use inputs as similar as
possible and to explicitly list the goals.  Is MPG the value we want to
track?  What about top speed?  My point is that the typical back and
forth talking past one another is just a waste of bandwidth.

Note that my request is not meant to favor one position or another and
if any reads it that way then they have misread it.

Fred