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Comment by crtified | Hacker News Reader

It's nice to hear, in principle.

Also expensive.

The requirement that, for the entire (up to 8-10 hour) duration of the trip, a suitably qualified therapist be on hand, must dictate that each non-trivial dosage under this regime will have a ticket price of several thousand dollars per-time.

It's one of the catch-22s in medicine. That a poor person on the street can have the same experience for $50 as a rich person has for $5000, with the difference in cost being the literal $4950 more of specialists and testers and monitors and side experts that the rich person is paying for. For reasons, yes, but that doesn't change the numbers, the fact that for every one of the latter there are 10 of the former.

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> poor person on the street can have the same experience for $50 as a rich person has for $5000

Not the same. You mentioned the ongoing support through the whole trip already. Then there's guidance for the purpose of the experience rather than possibly just getting lost in the feeling/escape. Then there's validated source/safety of the drugs. Finally, if anything goes wrong, you have a person hopefully trained in how to respond immediately.

That is basically the qualification I included in my later statements within the same post:

"..the difference in cost being the literal $4950 more of specialists and testers and monitors and side experts that the rich person is paying for. For reasons, yes..."

It remains to be seen if treatment will be covered by Medicare, and how large the payment gap will be in practice.

It will probably be only covered by health insurance for a long time. It takes a long time for new treatments to get to Medicare.

The PBS won't cover the drug portion of the treatment at least until there's good quality stage 3 clinical trials that support it's use. Even then, given the need for a long therapy session next to the drug, they'll likely have to create a special access scheme to cover both.

I'd say it's very unlikely that these treatments will ever be government subsidied for anything except very treatment resistant depression/PTSD (for psilocybin/MDMA respectively).

Also the experience is likely to be worse with some medical professional staring at you through the entire trip!

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