[mcny]

» my wife is an oncology nurse

Have you ever asked her if she wants to do the job of predicting when a patient will die? How many hours would she need to spend reading the patient's history to come up with a prediction she feels satisfied to use to decide what service the patient will get? I'm not a medical professional but my gut reaction is I don't want to do anything with predicting or sentencing if some machine can do it almost as well as I can.

I remember this story of a radiologist who told me he thinks we spend too much money for too little during the last about six months of a patient's life. If we had better information on when the last six months starts, maybe we could reduce the cost of healthcare? Apparently, we spend cost to 18% of GDP on healthcare in the US? Iirc, most of Europe is closer to 12?