Get the latest tech news
The financial costs of healthcare costs, or, is keeping me alive worth it?
Right now, from a society-wide perspective, the healthcare I’ve been getting to keep me temporarily alive against a squamous cell carcinoma onslaught probably fails the cost-benefit test.[1] …
Some of these musings are adapted from Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, and more directly from Peter Singer, who is I think the first to posit hypotheticals along the lines of “You are wearing an expensive suit and shoes worth many thousands of dollars. Transgene, for example, has a personalized vaccine that is supposed to prevent HNSCC recurrence: “In the head and neck cancer trial to date, all patients treated with TG4050 have remained disease-free, despite unfavorable systemic immunity and tumor micro-environment before treatment.” That’s a tremendous boon, particularly if it doesn’t involve the deleterious side effects of chemo or radiation. A future in which personalized vaccines prevent the hardship I’ve experienced, and the death I’m to experience shortly, is also good, and the FDA is bad for holding back medical progress and inflicting so much misery on me.
Or read this on Hacker News