DISQUS

Next Big Future: The Value of Real Disease Cures and Inexpensive Tests

  • OnlineInvestingAi · 5 months ago
    Hi.
    I enjoyed reviewing your much more detailed statistics, compared to my rather skimpy post.
    I did receive some emails suggesting that allowing people to live longer would end up being more expensive. Apparently healthy people will just want to sit around and collect Social Security checks. (Maybe genocide is some type of cost reduction program?)
  • nextbigfuture · 5 months ago
    In the Chicago study (and in the powerpoint presentation), they run
    through the numbers.

    research is the cheap part of the calculation at a few hundred billion.

    It is the implementation of treatment that determines the overall cost saving.

    so if there is a 25% chance of expensive treatment at 10 trillion and 25% chance
    of 2.5 trillion treatment that saves 2.5 trillion and 50% of failure. Then
    you have to have a system that does not implement 10 trillion
    treatment that ends up putting
    the system 5 trillion negative versus the 5 trillion gain of 10%
    cancer reduction.

    I will be updating the article to include this from the Chicago study.

    Brian
  • joelupchurch · 5 months ago
    There is an interesting article in the NY Times about how Cancer research has become a risk adverse jobs program where innovative research that might actually lead to cures is avoided. Everything is concentrated on simple problems where the research is unlikely to fail or produce substantial improvements in treatment:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/health/resear...