Futurisms: Critiquing the project to reengineer humanity

Thursday, October 29, 2009

The economics of magic pills: Questions for Methuselists












[Photo credit: Flickr user e-magic]


  1. There are two reasons for the increasing costs of medicine. One, it is a heavily regulated industry that is not free to innovate and to commercialize such innovations in the manner as, say, the semiconductor industry. It is also a very fascistic top-down industry via the state medical boards. I can go on and on about this, but will not. The other reason for increased costs is the refusal of the medical industry to consider aging itself to be the treatable cause of all of the other "age-related" medical conditions that are considered treatable.

    It should be obvious that ANY medical condition that occurs primarily in old people, but not young people, which not be considered separate disease states, but rather symptoms of the aging process itself. This has been obvious to me since the late 80's. It makes no sense to try to "cure" Alzheimer's and other such conditions without curing aging itself. Consider the following: 90% of all health care costs are paid by medicare. This means that 90% of all medical conditions in the U.S. are caused by the aging process itself. If you cure aging (SENS, for example) all of the other medical conditions will no longer occur in people. More people are starting to realize this. This is starting to be referred to as the "pro-longevity dividend" much like the "peace dividend" we got after then end of the cold war in the early 90's.

    Effective anti-aging medicine will reduce health care costs, not increase them.

  2. Kurt9, you say that the medical industry doesn’t innovate, but in fact there has been a lot of innovation in the past four decades, resulting in impressive and expensive cutting-edge technologies. A large part of the rising cost of medicine is actually caused by those pricey new technologies being widely used (and possibly overused).

    Your argument about Medicare doesn’t make any sense, either. (“Consider the following: 90% of all health care costs are paid by Medicare. This means that 90% of all medical conditions in the U.S. are caused by the aging process itself.”) Actually, Medicare accounts for closer to a quarter of health-care spending in the United States, and that fact by itself doesn’t tell you anything at all about the medical problems being treated.

    Your analogy to the “peace dividend” after the end of the Cold War is an odd one, too, since it is pretty widely recognized now that there was no such thing, and that the world has remained very dangerous even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

    Anyway, you might be right that we will someday discover a way to halt aging and to render our entire population immortal on the cheap. You can certainly spin magical yarns all day if you so please. But in the meantime, the technological and economic speculation you’re engaging in has absolutely no basis in the situation of today, the last few centuries, or the foreseeable future, in all of which medical costs tend to rise along with innovation and the use of medical services. And until a magical solution comes through and bends the curve in the opposition direction, the feelings of resentment — and the means we find justifiable in order to alleviate the perceived injustice of death — are likely to continue paradoxically to grow as our lives become longer and more prosperous.

