[ExI] government corruption

[Fred C. Moulton]

On Fri, 2009-02-27 at 07:09 -0800, spike wrote:
> I am surprised it is only twice as much.  Anything American made is three
> times as much as anything made in China.  Those life expectancy lists should
> be broken down by cause of death.  Most of it likely has little or nothing
> to do with the quality of medical care.  People who are murdered should not
> be in there, nor those who slay themselves abusing drugs.  Neither of these
> are the medics' fault.  Somewhere there probably exists data on this.  
> 
> Then too, we should eventually recognize the fact that different human
> genotypes have inherently different life spans.  Polynesians for instance,
> seldom live into their 80s.  Shorter lived genotypes have higher birth rates
> currently, pushing the life expectancy lower.
> 

Spike

A while back I lamented about the low quality of discussion on certain
topics and health care is one of those topics.  You are correct that a
serious analysis of health care needs to look at factors such as
genotypes, lifestyle issues such as smoking and much more.  Also it is
critically important is to be explicit about the goal of a health care
system.  For example is the goal:
A. Make sure that everyone as exactly the same level of care and same
level of outcomes?
B. Make sure that no-one has significantly better care and outcomes than
anyone else?
C. Make sure that individual choice is paramount?
D. E. F. G.... the list could go on. The point is that the goals need to
be made explicit and also all of the constraints and parameters.  For
example if one person thinks that government should control everyone
aspect of a persons life and a second person thinks there should be no
government control over their life then it is not likely that they will
agree on health care.  But for them arguing about health care itself is
a waste of time; they first need to deal with other more basic
disagreements.

I doubt we will see a more nuanced and sophisticated discussion of basic
philosophical issues such as the issue of relationship of the individual
and government on this list.  There are a couple of reasons for this;
first lists of this type do not lend themselves to that type of
discussion; second is that I suspect that many people really are not
interested.

Fred