Next Big Future - Latest Comments in The Value of Real Disease Cures and Inexpensive Tests

Re: The Value of Real Disease Cures and Inexpensive Tests

joelupchurch — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:05:25 -0000

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...

Re: The Value of Real Disease Cures and Inexpensive Tests

nextbigfuture — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:18:16 -0000

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

Re: The Value of Real Disease Cures and Inexpensive Tests

OnlineInvestingAi — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:32:19 -0000

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?)