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Comment by giardini | Hacker News Reader

"... or we could simply periodically cut everyone a small check."

And what do you do when they drink the check and once again lie dying in the street?

I really do agree with you - society can pay up to some point and no more. But at some point people must be allowed to die. For example, today I would not be opposed, in the case of cancer, to society providing payment for all necessary pain medications and hospice care to the point of death rather than paying for (surgery, chemotherapy, radiation) treatment. Lifespans would be shorter, death quicker but it is IMO a reasonable and far less expensive option.

Nobody really survives cancer although they may die trying. We need to terminate the cancer industry (but maintain cancer research). They are an industry selling pure hope with no significant probability of a cure today. They are a cancer on our economy.

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And what do you do when they drink the check and once again lie dying in the street?

Not particularly much you can do in that case, no?

If we can manage it as a society in a sustainable way, people should be protected somewhat from bad fortune, whether it's from a ephemeral event or a bad roll in the genetic lottery. Protecting people from the predictable consequences of their own bad decisions is another thing entirely.

Nobody really survives cancer

For many cancers this is simply not true. I know many people who are 5-10-15 years out from when they were declared cancer free after treatment. Should we have let them die when first diagnosed?

Maybe we should. We like to say you can't put a price on a life, yet our actions do not agree with our words. I'm sure any of us could come up with a long list of ways we indirectly place a monetary value on a life. The difference is we rarely acknowledge it out loud, and when someone does we collectively feign indignation that someone could be so callous.

It's time to end the hypocrisy and address these issues head on. Health care is so expensive because of insanely expensive treatments we use to extend the lives of chronic or terminal patients by months. It seems gravely immoral as a society to spend millions extending the life of one person while letting another die from lack of health care at all (whether or not the person is paying for it with their own money is irrelevant).

I'm not saying I know where these lines are, but we need to have this conversation.

If I learned one thing from my family of physicians (specifically pathologist parents), it is that anyone who makes broad, sweeping statements about "cancer" knows absolutely nothing about what they're talking about.

So no one survives cancer? I would say plenty of people survive B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia, since the average survival for a negative ZAP-70 is over 25 years and many people don't even get treatment for it because they'll die of other things long before B-CLL.

Educate yourself before making statements like "we need to terminate the cancer industry."

I agree with the general point that you can’t give a blank check for anything, but I think your specific point about cancer is off-base.

Some quick google-fu teaches me that in 2008, $90 billion was spent in the US on cancer treatment. During the same year, $2.4 trillion was spent on health care in general. Given that cancer is [at least as of 2007] the second leading cause of death in the US, this proportion doesn’t seem blatantly wrong; I would want society to tackle some of the other well-documented inefficiencies in our health-care system before cracking down on chemotherapy.

IIRC one of these inefficiencies is that terminally ill people who would rather get cheap palliative care than expensive, aggressive, and uncertain treatment... can’t get the cheap care covered by insurance.

My grandfather had stomach cancer in the 1960s, when he was in his 40s. He was very fortunate that it was detected quickly and removed successfully. He ended up dying of a heart attack in his 70s.

Nobody lives forever, but some people do survive cancer.

Make the 'cash' only spendable on a specific category of necessities. Such as rent, food, transportation, etc. But your creating bureaucracy to manage that, and people will find ways to get around it.

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