[ExI] What Makes People Vote Republican

[Emlyn]

2008/9/20 Damien Sullivan <phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu>:
> On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 11:50:26AM +1030, Emlyn wrote:
>
>> back to insurance (and that becomes an eternal pain point, to be
>> sure). Secondly, public  health care isn't a five-star hotel kind of
>> experience; it's batch mode. It's not fun to be in hospital like that,
>> but then maybe that's a useful disincentive to abusing the system.
>
> I never got this "abuse" fear.  Health care isn't like energy, where you
> can use unbounded amounts of it.  No one wants another MRI or
> colonoscopy.  If you got a flu vaccine, you don't need another shot that
> year of the same batch.  If you're not wounded, you don't need
> antiseptic or a bandaid; if you are, you only need so much.  If you're
> healthy, you're healthy.  It's possible for demand to exceed supply,
> especially at the end of life, but it's also at least conceivable for
> supply to exceed demand, which isn't true of energy.
>
> -xx- Damien X-)

well... what is well? We have a health care system that generally
tries to take people who are less than healthy, and bring them to
healthy. But, we increasingly see people who are healthy wanting to
move toward more than healthy; a core extropic aim in fact! And that
tends to bring into focus the fact that the definition of healthy is
quite relative, and biased, and fuzzy.

That said, universal medicine, for now, should probably continue using
an absolute definition of healthy and sick, and leave any healthy+
stuff for people's own wallets. But with luck that doesn't need to
always be the case!

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com - my home
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