Yvain comments on Excuse me, would you like to take a survey? - Less Wrong

12 Post author: Yvain 26 April 2009 09:23PM

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Comment author: gjm 26 April 2009 11:42:59PM 2 points [-]

Robin Hanson notoriously thinks that most medicine does little or no good. I'd guess that he opposes large-scale socialized medicine on these grounds, though that's not a foregone conclusion and I don't think I've seen an explicit statement from him about this. It's probably more usual to think that medicine is great and we should all have easier access to more of it. How about a question somewhere in this vicinity?

Comment author: Yvain 27 April 2009 06:25:46AM 1 point [-]

Yes, but how can we phrase this rigorously? "Medicine does little good" seems too open to interpretation.

Comment author: Zvi 28 April 2009 01:14:52AM 0 points [-]

There's a few options that come to mind, none of them perfect. One basic one is to ask how much we should be spending on health care; the risk here is if you think there is counterfactual effective medical spending. Another is what we feel is the marginal cost to current medicine of an additional year of life or healthy life, which could also be compared to what people think that year or a life saved is worth. What percentage of the current investment in medicine has a substantial benefit to the patient? is a way to try and measure this directly rather than indirectly.