Healthcare
This is an amazing article...
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health_medicine/4327012.html?page=3
Note: This is more about the tone of the Healthcare debate and the desire to reduce the money spent on healthcare, than Obama's stated goal of optimizing the Healthcare system.
While Kamen is promoting a form of trickle down healthcare, he rightly points out that the computer you have now, at the price you got it for, was trickled on you. It likely uses technology from a vastly more expensive computer a few years earlier.
To fix inequality, one needs to embrass class differences and screw the poor, because having people willing to overpay will drive development, which will drive progress, that will drive prices down and help the poor. To narrow the inequality, you need to think not in cost, but in time. How long before what the rich are buying becomes afordable to the poor? In computers that's about 2 to 3 years. In medicine, it's bit longer, but ultimately, the advancements do drop in price. Is 10 years to long to get life saving healthcare to the poor? The solution is to speed up the cycle.
Kurtzweil predicts that in the near future, the difference between what a billionair can afford and a poor person will be about 2 months. We're starting to see it now, with rapid price drops after release on must have technology. Is this model really so bad for medicine?
To quote a future Paris Hilton, "Your cancer cure is soo last week."
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health_medicine/4327012.html?page=3
Note: This is more about the tone of the Healthcare debate and the desire to reduce the money spent on healthcare, than Obama's stated goal of optimizing the Healthcare system.
While Kamen is promoting a form of trickle down healthcare, he rightly points out that the computer you have now, at the price you got it for, was trickled on you. It likely uses technology from a vastly more expensive computer a few years earlier.
To fix inequality, one needs to embrass class differences and screw the poor, because having people willing to overpay will drive development, which will drive progress, that will drive prices down and help the poor. To narrow the inequality, you need to think not in cost, but in time. How long before what the rich are buying becomes afordable to the poor? In computers that's about 2 to 3 years. In medicine, it's bit longer, but ultimately, the advancements do drop in price. Is 10 years to long to get life saving healthcare to the poor? The solution is to speed up the cycle.
Kurtzweil predicts that in the near future, the difference between what a billionair can afford and a poor person will be about 2 months. We're starting to see it now, with rapid price drops after release on must have technology. Is this model really so bad for medicine?
To quote a future Paris Hilton, "Your cancer cure is soo last week."