>> america moment
> Yes I'm trying to frame it in terms the audience of HN can understand.
> I'm not sure what's wrong with that.
What's wrong is that it's orthogonal to the problem, so it risks creating a pointless discussion about health insurance instead of focusing on the technology. The key problem is the ability to regrow limbs is not yet within our technological reach.
Having (or not) health insurance won't get you another pair of legs if you walk on a mine. Maybe you'll get very fancy prosthetics, but it will not be flesh and bone.
In a world where this is known technology, even if the costs may initially put it out of reach of people without insurance, should it just be a gene edit AND we have the ability to gene edit like we now have the ability to 3d print, the cat will be out of the bag, and it will be like people buying 3d printers to 3d print guns in countries where gun ownership is forbidden, or people ordering drugs on the dark web: it may be illegal, but people with addictions (or here, without legs) may not really care about the legality.
Or they will just do a road trip to Mexico, like how it is for dental work.
Health insurance is rarely the #1 issue: I think even Europeans do similar trips when they want something immediately instead of accepting long waitlines or some procedures not being officially available in their country. The only difference is they don't go to Mexico but to Turkey, the Balkans or Eastern Europe.
What we need is more technology, and fewer legal limitations, like how it was pointed out last week about how the FDA risk aversion costs human lives in a way that's impossible (or extremely hard) to measure.
We're very lucky the Trump administration (and a few others around the world) decided to bypass the regular vaccine safety process during operation warp speed: regardless of what you think about Covid vaccines, we now have mRNA vaccine technology, which is already being tested for many other things.