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Raw_Power comments on Rationality Quotes September 2011 - Less Wrong
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I have left it ambiguous on purpose. What this means specifically depends on the means available at any given time.
IDEALLY: Universal means everyone should have a right to as much health service as is necessary for their bodies and minds functioning as well as it can, if they ask for it. That would include education, coaching, and sports, among many others. And nobody should ever be allowed to die if they don't want to and there's any way of preventing it.
Between "leaving anyone to die because they don't have the money or assets to pay for their treatment"[your question puzzles me, what part of this scenario don't you understand] and "spending all our country's budget on progressively changing the organs of seventy-year-.olds", there's a lot of intermediate points. The touchy problem is deciding how much we want to pay for, and how, and who pays it for whom, No matter how you cut the cake, given our current state of development, at some point you have to say X person dies in spite of their will because either they can't afford to live or because *his can't". So, are you going to deny that seventy-year-old their new organs?
Yes, unless there is nobody else that can use them. If my watching of House tells me anything it is standard practice to prioritize by this kind of criteria.
I like this answer, if only for emotional reasons :). I also think the vast majority of seventy-years-old would be compelled by this argument.
Yes, it's amazing how many bad decisions are made because it's heartbreaking to just say no.
More like it's potentially corrupting, but yeah, that too.
Resources are limited and medical demand is not. The medical response time if the President of the United States gets shot is less for than if anyone else gets shot. It's not possible to give everyone as much health protection as the president. So it's not a scenario. I can imagine each person as being the only person on earth with such care, and I can imagine imagining a single hypothetical world has each person with that level of care, but I can't actually imagine it.
That indicates that no argument about the type of thing to be done will be based on a difference in kind. It won't resemble saying that we should switch from what happens at present to "no-one being left to die just because they happen not to have a given amount of money". We currently allow some people to die based on rationing, and you are literally proposing the impossible to connote that you would prefer a different rationing system, but then you get tripped up when sometimes speaking as if the proposal is literally possible.
Declaring that someone has a right is declaring one's willingness to help that person get something from others over their protests. We currently allow multimillionaires, and we allow them to spend all their money trying to discover a cure for their child's rare or unique disease, and we allow people to drive in populated areas.
We allow people to spend money in sub-optimal ways. Resources being limited means that not every disease gets the same attention. Allowing people to drive in populated areas is implicitly valuing the fun and convenience of some people driving over the actuarially inevitable death and carnage to un-consenting pedestrians.
I don't understand how you want to ration or limit people, in an ideal world, because you have proposed the literally impossible as a way of gesturing towards a different rationing system (infinitely) short of that ideal and (as far as I can see) not different in kind than any other system.
By analogy, you don't describe what you mean when you declare "infinity" a number preferable to 1206. Do you mean that any number higher than 1206 is equally good? Do you mean that every number is better than its predecessor, no matter what? Since you probably don't, then...what number do you mean? Approximately?
I can perhaps get an idea of the function if you tell me some points of x (resources) and y (what you are proposing).
Not quite. ER doctor.
Your post confuses me a lot: I am being entirely honest about this, there seem to be illusions of transparency and (un)common priors. The only part I feel capable of responding to is the first: I can perfectly imagine every human being having as much medical care as the chief of the wealthiest most powerful organization in the world, in an FAI-regimented society. For a given value of "imagining", of course: I have a vague idea of nanomachines in the bloodstream, implants, etc. I basically expect human bodies to be self-sufficient in taking care of themsleves, and able to acquire and use the necessary raw materials with ease, including being able to medically operate on themselves. The rare cases will be left to the rare specialist, and I expect everyone to be able to take care of the more common problems their bodies and minds may encounter.
As for the rest of your post:
What are people's rationing optimixation functions? Is it possible to get an entire society to agree to a single one, for a given value of "agree"? Or is it that people don't have a consistent optimization function, and that it's not so much a matter of some things being valued over others as a matter of tradition and sheer thoughtless inertia? Yes, I know I am answering questions with questions, but that's all I got right now.
Thank you for leading with that.
This seems to sidestep the limited resources issue, making your argument not clearly apply outside of that context.
Let me give an example outside of health to discuss the resources issue. I have read that when a guy tried to make a nuclear power source in his garage from clock parts, government agents swooped in very soon after it started emitting radiation - presumably there are people monitoring for that, with field agents ever-ready to pursue leads. This means that, for some 911 calls where the nuclear team would be the first to the scene, we allow the normal police to handle it, even at the risk of people's lives. If that isn't the case, imagine a world in which it were so, and in which it would be easy to tell that the police would be slower than the nuke guys (who don't even leave their stations most days). I think having such an institution would be worthwhile, even at the cost of crimes in progress being responded to slower.
Similarly, I think many things would be worth diverting resources from better policing, such as health - and from health to other things, such as better policing, and from both to fun, privacy, autonomy, and so forth. I'm only referring to a world in which resources are limited.
It is possible that there is a society wealthy enough to ensure very good health care for those it can influence by eliminating all choice about what to eat, mandating exercise, eliminating privacy to enforce those things, etc. It's not obvious to me that it's always the right choice to optimize health or that that would be best for the hypothetical society.
Considering the principle of diminishing returns, there's no plausible way of describing people's preferences such that all effort should be put towards better health. we don't have to be able to describe them perfectly to say that being forced to eat only the healthiest foods does not comport with them - ask any child told to eat vegetables before desert.