Cryonics as it is right now is expensive, but not ridiculously so ($28,000 at CI ). If everyone was cryo-persevered at death the cost per person would drop dramatically. Meanwhile medical costs during the last year of life are already high: "Studies have shown that the 5% of Medicare patients who die each year account for 30% of Medicare's costs, with 78% of last-year-of-life expenses occurring in the month before death." here.
Dying costs, on average, $10k-$35k depending on where you live your last few months.
These costs are more likely to increase than to decrease. And they buy very few QALY (or even just plain non-adjusted years). Calling it quits a few months early and getting cryo-preserved could very well be a net savings once it's a widely available option. And, if it ends up working, would have a much greater return in QALY.
If everyone was cryo-persevered at death the cost per person would drop dramatically.
Mike Darwin, FWIW, disagrees strongly. You might be able to get economies of scale for the storage part, but that was never a significant chunk of the cost. And formalizing procedures do not necessarily drive net prices down, as the massive decades-long increases in medical costs in the US and worldwide show...
One thing that struck me in the 2011 survey was that 90% of LW respondents were under age 38. I'm 57 myself. It seems that often rationality in planning our lives depends on estimates of what values and utility functions we will hold in the future. Has anyone looked systematically at what projected older versions of themselves would think, based on what relevant groups of existing older folks think?
"You'll understand when you're older" is an annoying form of argument. Arguably there's some grain of truth there when a 7-year-old tells you that sex is disgusting and he or she will never ever think it's anything but incredibly gross. But you could explain hormonal changes that as a matter of empirical fact change opinions on that subject in the vast majority of cases. I can't think of anything that dramatic that distinguishes 60-year-olds or 80-year-olds from 20-year-olds.
My dim recollection of studies is that on the whole as people age they tend to be less idealistic, more resigned to society the way it is rather than how it might be, and more constrained by realities of politics and economics (for starters).
I don't presume to offer anything in this regard based on my age, and in any case I'm only a single person (a nihilist when pressed, but one who finds himself happier pretending not to be and working sporadically for rationality, truth, justice, love, and all that good stuff).
When I read of cryonics, what comes to my mind is the escalating costs of health care and (as I see it) the need to curb the development of expensive life-extending medical procedures. Cryonics sounds instead like an extremely expensive procedure. Maybe no one is suggesting it be covered by health insurance, and it's just an option that some people pay out of pocket for. Even so, the "health care is a right, not a privilege" sentiment will mean that if it was shown to work, everyone would want it, and (in my estimation) society would go completely haywire in an unpleasant way.
Now, the substance of the above has probably been discussed elsewhere at length; I raise it is an example because when I was 21 I would have thought of it very differently than I do now.