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ChristianKl comments on Politics Discussion Thread August 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.