[verifex]

Wife and I had an unlikely pregnancy ourselves. We tried for possibly 8 years with no luck, finally we gave in and started the process to do in vitro with entailed lots of tests and everything. Then, the day before we were scheduled to start the process (during xmas no less) and lay down a lot of $$$ for the procedure, wife takes a pregnancy test and shockingly, it indicates positive. Kid was born healthy and happy. I hesitate to call him some kind of xmas miracle kid, but I mean.. the context and everything really drove the point home. :)

[gonzo41]

I'm really happy you saved a ton of money and got what you wanted. IVF is not only mega costly, it's also a brutal roller coaster of emotions for all involved.

[hamburglar]

Indeed. I went through that for second kid and it was just excruciatingly bad for my wife. 28 day cycle of absolute misery and disappointment for months. We are divorced now but I still feel bad for what she experienced emotionally.

[royjacobs]

Unless you live in a country like The Netherlands, where the first three IVF procedures are, in fact, free. I won't disagree with you on the roller coaster of emotions, though.

[bleuarff]

Or France, where the first 4 procedures are paid for by health services. Going to the pharmacy for the ovarian stimulation drugs for my wife and seeing the one-week treatment would have cost us hundreds of euros; I sure was glad to live in such a country!

[burrows]

What does the word “free” mean here?

I assume the clinical professionals are paid and the researchers were paid and the pharma venders are paid, so that money is coming from somewhere. Is it that someone other than you pays for it?

[nautilius]

It's pretty clear what 'free' means here, the person getting the treatment is not billed for the treatment. In that way, a society organizes that no one has the existential threat (financially or medically) of prohibitively high cost.

It's so obvious that I don't understand how people still see it as this elevating 'gotcha' moment. It's the same when you drink free beer, breath free air, enjoy free time, etc: obviously it doesn't just appear from nothingness but has (opportunity) cost.

[burrows]

> It's pretty clear what 'free' means here, the person getting the treatment is not billed for the treatment.

Actually I think that’s a pretty good example of what confuses me about this usage of “free”. Usually when I call something “free” I am making a claim about who pays for the thing, but as you pointed out, in this case it has something to do with who is billed by the service provider.

> In that way, a society organizes that no one has the existential threat (financially or medically) of prohibitively high cost.

IMO, no current Earth society comes close to that criteria. For example, if someone has a currently untreatable disease, then isn’t that just saying the cost of treatment is prohibitively high? ie, the cost of hiring scientists, renting lab space, running trials, etc.

[nautilius]

> in this case it has something to do with who is billed by the service provider.

What else could it even be? You started your gotcha with the truism that it's not free, so, yeah, nothing is free, and the whole discussion is meaningless. You're arguing in bad faith, but that just makes your argument meaningless.

> no current Earth society comes close to that criteria. For example, if someone has a currently untreatable disease

Your counterargument is that there exist diseases that cannot be treated anywhere?

Let me give you an example of something treatable: Endemic (flea-borne_) typhus. In Europe, the given example is "British POWs in Germany at the end of World War I when they described conditions in Germany." [1] In the US, instead Typhus shows up in the reports of the LA Medical Association as a regular occurence (among homeless, mostly). [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemic_typhus [2] https://www.ladocs.org/news-events/news/lac-dph-health-alert...

[aabceh]

Do you also get confused by free food tastings in grocery stores?

[royjacobs]

Certainly. It's being paid for by the universal basic health care that our government provides. One of the reasons we pay taxes.

[burrows]

Okay, you give the government money (taxes) and then the government pays the clinics for your medical care (with the tax money).

But doesn’t that mean you’re still paying for your own medical care with the government acting as a middle-man? So then it’s not free.

[kwhitefoot]

You are missing the key feature: solidarity.

It is not paying for your own medical care it is paying a small proportion of everyone's medical care.

And in fact for a proportion of the population it is in fact free or nearly so because they have never paid any income tax or the cost was so high that the taxes they did pay plus the proceeds of selling very possession they had and selling their children into servitude still wasn't enough to pay for it.

And lastly, we all understand the point of taxation and redistribution (at least in Europe we do) so what exactly was the point you were repeatedly failing to make clear?

[droopyEyelids]

Do you feel like this was an insightful point that needed clarification?

[royjacobs]

Sure, if for some reason you want to take the most absolute, most pedantic definition of the word 'free' and you are utterly confused by it meaning something else then, yes, it is not free.

I hope this clears things up for you.