[darawk]

Um, you're a millionaire. Why don't you put up the money? Someone is paying for it. This is literally an ultra-wealthy person complaining that someone else won't pay for her friend's million dollar medical treatment.

It's fine if you want to argue for single payer healthcare. But where do you get off berating a non-charitable institution about covering their costs? They have their longevity to think about. If they simply gave everyone infinite treatment for free they wouldn't exist anymore.

[threatofrain]

Yes, if someone should be paying for random medical tragedy, that's a discussion that should happen at government-scale such as with subsidized insurance, not something pushed around like an externality or hot potato.

[sjg007]

Stanford is a non-profit. It is also charitable. It sounds like this guy wasn't given his options properly. Clearly he found insurance and was treated. I actually think that the social workers and financial workers at Stanford do a very poor job and this is from experience. I am sure that goes all the way up the executive chain. Imagine if you are a poor immigrant. Imagine if you don't have a rich friend to advocate for you.

[darawk]

> Stanford is a non-profit. It is also charitable.

Yes, but even non-profits have to manage their resources.

[sjg007]

So? What’s your point here?

[darawk]

My point is that if they eat the cost of everyone's treatment, they will not continue to exist.

[onetimemanytime]

Yp! Why should the hospital bear the entire cost of his treatment? People will die, others will go hungry, others sleep under the bridge and so on. But these problems need to be solved by the society in general, i can't berate e restaurant because they serve food and many people around it go hungry. If hospitals cured people for free they'd close their doors within months.

Anne: >>What kind of morals are reflected in our society when you know you can save someone’s life but refuse to do so bc of payment?!

Anne Wojcicki should put her money where her mouth is...she is worth, what hundreds of millions or a few billion (was married to Sergey) and has 123and me. What kind of morals does she have when she could help thousands and thousands of people with her money, yet she doesn't. Shame on her...

[codecamper]

Super rich person that does not want to pay for a friend. Nice! Now I don't feel so bad that Sergey left her.

[bsder]

You are defending the position that we should let someone die because they don't have enough money to pay for medical treatment.

Are you really sure you want to go there?

Now, if you want to argue I would argue that why is this CEO letting a "friend" go without healthcare when CoveredCA has platinum plans at about $7000/year for an individual?

[darawk]

> You are defending the position that we should let someone die because they don't have enough money to pay for medical treatment.

> Are you really sure you want to go there?

Yes, I absolutely am. Grown-ups in the adult world have to make choices. We have limited resources and time, and yes, sometimes that means that we can't give life saving treatments to every person that needs it.

[2_listerine_pls]

Assuming they were limited, but what if they weren't ? Some drugs/treatments cost more just because a greedy murderer was allowed to rack the price.

[darawk]

Occasionally that is true, but often if you look more deeply into the pricing of these things, that's really not the case. Pharmaceutical companies are businesses, and they invested hundreds of millions, sometimes billions of dollars of their own money to discover these treatments. They have to be able to recoup that cost in the market place. If you do not allow them to do that, they simply won't invest in finding the treatments anymore.

There are alternative funding models, of course. We could have the government fund all pharmaceutical research. But that has a whole host of other problems. It's really actually a difficult problem without a simple solution. You might say "well, maybe we should do a mixed public/private model of some kind", and if you said that, you'd probably arrive at about what we have now in the US.

[2_listerine_pls]

> Pharmaceutical companies ... invested hundreds of millions, ... to discover these treatments.

Some purchased the rights only to rack up the prices. Just because they are a business doesn't mean they should be allowed.

[darawk]

Yes, that is true, but irrelevant. A purchasing entity can price the drug fairly, and an entity doing original research can price the drug unfairly. Whether or not the IP was bought and sold is a non-sequitur.

What actually matters is that we have two problems:

1. How do we incentivize drug discovery?

2. How do we treat all the people that need treatment?

Right now our answer to #1 is that we allow people to charge the people that need treatment, for a limited time. This system works ok, but there may be better ones. If you have any, i'd love to hear them.

[grk]

This sounds extremely weird when you read it in Europe.

[icebraining]

We in Europe have the same choices to face. For example,

" In June, Nice said the £48,000 per year price tag of the drug, which could benefit 450 women a year, could not be justified."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/11785840/NICE-refuse...

[darawk]

You know that in Europe you don't automatically get any lifesaving treatment that exists, right?

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/dec/20/drug-giants-...

http://jme.bmj.com/content/27/3/179

[duncanawoods]

Doesn't to me. Deploying limited resources effectively is critical to all care-giving. There is no "costs don't matter" in Europe.

The US aspect that is weird is when the discussion is not really about maximising value, its actually about maximising profits.

[holenda]

No it does not. There are treatments that are deemed to expensive and will not be provided. Typically it will be a trade off between how effective the treatment is and how expensive it is. European healtcare systems does not have infinite money.

[icebraining]

Are you really sure you want to go there?

This is just bullying, regardless of how disagreeable you find someone's position.

[candiodari]

And she is defending that effectively tax money should pay for medical treatment. ANY medical treatment, with the only limitation that it prolongs life.

It is already the case that millions people lost ~20% of their disposable income because of insurance increases. In many cases it is lower a LOT of people who would normally be comfortably above the poverty line back down to the poverty line (those are the people losing the most in the individual mandate and subsidy system). And we all know that anything less than 2x the poverty line definitely feels like poverty and already cannot be escaped through savings and/or good financial sense.

So there is a choice to be made. A choice between the cost of the individual mandate and coverage on families and the fact that we want everyone to be "saved" from health problems.

This is further complicated by the fact that anyone saved from a health problem increases healthcare demands both linearly (very few health treatment really fixes things, so future demands on healthcare by the same patient will on average be higher), and exponential (a LOT of health problems are inheritable), because people demand the genetics of their kids be "respected" even when known problems exist. Afterwards, of course, it is unfair to blame the kids or the parents, even in entirely predictable problem cases. And then you have 5 kid families, where the parents were warned long before anything happened, which all have severe genetic problems resulting in brain defects. 2 cannot survive a single day without medical care and only 1 will ever live independently. But 3 would like to marry and have kids themselves (I don't blame the kids, however the parents should have known better, also we need to figure out the very sane policy of 100% refund of fertility treatments for couples without fertility problems for this reason) ... At what point is it not reasonable anymore ?

[jonhendry18]

Insurance premium increases were increasing and erasing real wage growth for years before the ACA was passed.