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OrphanWilde comments on Politics Discussion Thread August 2012 - Less Wrong
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Finite, considered as a nonabstract referential, because blue describes a finite length of the electromagnetic spectrum. Of course, we could consider it in the abstract, in which case it's not something.
If you proceed to argue that it can't be nothing, then we've been embroiled in a semantic argument from the beginning, about what constitutes something as opposed to nothing. Inwhichcase you've defined away healthcare as a meaningful referential to anything in the real world, and inwhichcase nothing you've written has any bearing on what I wrote, which considered the real problem of the real limitations of real resources.
If I halve the wavelength of blue I don't get something that's half blue. I don't consider blue something unreal. I just don't consider it a resource in the same sense as money is a resource. Things can be real without being resources for which can be finitive in the same sense of the word 'finitive' that applies to money.
To me healthcare is something like "more men-years of good health".
I wouldn't measure healthcare in amount of hospital beds taken up by patients or by the number of operations that are performed.
Putting people into hospital beds can increase or reduce men-years of good health. The same is true for performing operations. Hospital beds or operations are resources that are finite resources.
Men years of good health aren't resources that you can allocate in the same way as you can allocate hospital beds. They behave differently. It doesn't make sense to treat them the same way.
I think you've just described health, not health care.
If you don't think that health care is about health your initial argument makes no sense.
You defined health care as societies ability to prevent people from dying. Especially those people that are valuable to society.
Being "about" health doesn't make it health. If I have a magical machine that produces an infinite number of bleggs, I can describe the state of bleggs as being infinite, but I still can't describe blegg machines as being in infinite number.
It matters. You're arguing that healthcare isn't a finite resource because allocation of healthcare could conceivably produce a non-finite amount of health. But it doesn't follow from that that healthcare is a non-finite resource. If we only have one Perfect Health Machine, a theoretical machine which enables clinical immortality, we -still- have to decide who gets to use it. If we decide to build another, that consumes finite resources. We can only have a finite number of Perfect Health Machines which can each only process a finite number of people in any finite amount of time. The potential for "infinite health", however one defines that, doesn't imply a potential for infinite healthcare.
You argument rests on the claim that you can prevent valuable people from dying by allocating healthcare resources to them. If that's not something you believe I think I win the substance of argument and our further disagreement is about insignificant semantics.