Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

"While Novartis will not estimate the price it will ultimately put on the treatment, some industry analysts project it will cost $500,000 per infusion."

Meanwhile, the latest version of the US Senate's healthcare bill includes the so-called Cruz Amendment[1], which would allow insurance companies to offer health insurance plans without essential health benefits, which would allow lifetime caps on insurance[2], which could mean that your six year old with recurring leukemia gets pulled off their treatment when they're halfway through. Not because you did anything wrong, per se, but because maybe your employer refuses to spring for health care plans with more than an $x dollar cap. Or you never anticipated something so horrific and catastrophic happening to your family.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/us/politics/senate-republ...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/2017/05/02/allowing-states-to-defi...

View on HN

You could always pay the alternate price of kidnapping a Novartis executive's child until the treatment is completed, and then surrendering yourself to a lengthy prison term afterward. I can't pay $500k out of my own pocket, but I can buy a roll of duct tape and rationalize the hell out of an ethically tricky situation.

That's one of the classic posers to gauge someone's level of ethical maturity, isn't it? Your child is dying, and you cannot afford the treatment. Would you steal it instead of buying it? Why?

That sounds horrible.

Although, I do wonder what effects there would be if a cancer cure-all were discovered.

Since nearly everyone would need the treatment at some point, it wouldn't really be insurance anymore; more like a mortgage.

We're already at this stage - we have many life-extending (there's no life saving, only extending it for smaller or larger amounts) treatments and procedures, and the amount is growing. For pretty much every patient who dies currently we could extend their life a bit more (not they'd always want that, mind you) if we put in more resources in that patient.

It's tautologically clear that it's not possible to do everything for everyone, i.e. a community 100% composed of doctors and nurses wouldn't be able to provide all the possible life-extending things (especially late in life/close to death) to everyone of themselves. So one way or another we need a process to decide where we stop, i.e. what life-extending things will not be provided to which people.

Of course, there's a major practical difference between in a process that takes/costs one day of labor and extends life expectancy by a year, and a process that takes/costs a year of labor and extends life expectancy by a day - but there's no conceptual difference, and we have options all along that scale to find where the tradeoff starts/stops making sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com