Only for the patient and only in the immediate term. But if you could increase your wealth by more than the cost of the cure by living longer, then you could say dying is more expensive. And the same for society, if your future contributions (taxes and others) are worth more than the cost of the cure.

Only if you treat people as cattle and expect returns (taxes and others) from them. A very common but inhuman way of treating people.

True, including lost knowledge, etc.

It makes sense to invest as much money possible in returning someone to being the most productive they can in a society, especially if you think about automation systems that will lower costs of everything more and more - assuming a profit layer isn't gouging unreasonably; that is if you are following trusted processes and carefully following them as to not make mistakes, and directing investment towards fixing source causes and not simply symptoms, when possible. The problem I have personally been facing the past two years relating to this kind of process is from human error - incompetence (inability to do something successfully) - whereby I've observed that it seems doctors are selected for their memorization skills to regurgitate information on tests (etc) and not critical thinking skills, to understand more complex, less straight-forward scenarios. And this will likely lead me to ending my life; I have chronic pain I have been problem solving, had success with healing, but have been stonewalled by illogical thinking. I am trying to write my story out, though it's difficult for me to organize thought and focus/concentrate enough for longer form.

Also take in count the psychological impact for relatives and close ones.

You can find infinite varieties of confounding variables and perform infinite levels of indirection to find effects.

Maybe the death of someone will motivate someone to perform better. Maybe if a relative dies of lung cancer from smoking, I will be motivated to quit, which thereby increases my productive output (healthier, less time smoking). Maybe keeping the person alive longer will increase the total number of visits to them in the hospital, which could be considered lost productivity time.

Even just factoring in purely lost output from compassionate leave would probably contribute significantly to bridging that gap (not that any employer should even try and quantify it, but if we're looking at the "system cost" of treatment vs non-treatment, the wider impact is probably staggering).

That depends on circumstances and how expensive treating the disease is.

For the patient, it depends on the care you'll need while dying from it. If it takes 5 years, the first two missing lots of work and the last 3 taking increasing amounts of care, either through home nursing, family member, or nursing home... well, it depends on how much the medicines cost, both for the disease and symptom management. I'm assuming we are minimally letting folks die comfortably.

Then there are outside costs to dying. Children or a spouse might need extra help for years - and the younger you die, the more likely this is. Therapy for younger children costs money. The family income has likely been greatly reduced (assuming both adults are working). If you rent, the landlord might lose some money, possibly more if you live alone and die at home since the landlord not only is responsible for cleanup, but is losing money until the apartment is rented again. MInimally, a funeral is required, often costing at least $15k. Workplaces often have to deal with some of the fallout of a death. Then there are other things: Money owed to various places and so on.

That's a short def of cheaper. It only is true if on average being a human costs net money, and that's obviously not the case. Life is quite an investment. It follows from your logic that it's cheaper to not have life saving tech at all, yet human value took off when we got it. Old people have wisdom, and information is valuable.

I think, if you try to prove that it makes economical sense to make peoples' lives better and longer, you will always fail- it will always be more profitable to treat people like cattle and let them die quickly. Economic thinking is broken like that: the highest value is money, there isn't any value that doesn't translate into money and there is no way to justify losing money to gain anything else.

Reality doesn't really work like this, or in any case that's just a twisted interpretation of reality.

When we began to acquire the ability to improve life, the value of humanity went up, and even proposed a mechanism (that with age comes more value). You didn't say anything about it, nor did you support you "cattle is cheaper" assertion.

If it's cheaper to let people die, then it follows that med tech is a waste of money, which (almost) anyone can see is not true.

Consider a simple example, Vitamin C. Cheaper to not know it's necessary for life? Things we consider expensive treatments now, become cheap in the future; hence this thread.

My point is that you can't use money to measure the value of life. And that if you do, you'll eventually find that life is, well, worthless.

I cant imagine where you get that idea. We easily assign minimum values (in any store of value you want) to life constantly. People are what make things valuable. Using "money" to talk about value seems to be the hang up, but you haven't said why.

>> Using "money" to talk about value seems to be the hang up, but you haven't said why.

I'm specifically discussing the use of money as a measure of the value of life- not of anything else.

Why is it wrong? Because we use money to set the exchange rate of commodities, but life is not a commodity. For example, all modern societies have laws against slavery, which is precisely treating human lives as goods to be exchanged for money.

Further, money can be hoarded and there are great inequalities in income. If people are worth as much money as they have, the worth of human life will be as unequal as peoples' bank accounts. However, again, all modern societies have laws that recognise any human life is as valuable as any other, at least for the puprose of protecting and taking those lives - e.g. I don't really know that any modern societies have any laws that prohibit the murder of high-income individuals but not of low-income ones.

Finally, you can always make more money, as, to a certain extent, you can always make more of a valuable commodity. Human beings are unique entities- a person is born once, lives once and dies once. In that sense, one person is a distinctly different quantity than one kilo of oranges, one litre of milk, or one karat of gold. It is really not obvious how we can extend the use of a measure of the trade value of goods to the "worth" of human beings.

And by the way, we haven't even begun to define what this "worth" is that money is a measure of (or rather, a proxy). The worth of one kilo of oranges is that they can be eaten. The worth of a person is...?

I def did not mean to suggest human value is tied to a persons fortune. Before this much more insightful comment you argued that the value of a human was zero (worthless), now you argue the opposite, that human life is priceless. If that's an accurate summary of your position, we agree.

I don't understand this because a living person is (usually) productive, producing value for the remainder of their life. It's like saying it's cheaper to never repair or improve a rental property because it costs money to do so.

Sometimes repairing a property or a car is more expensive than buying or building a new one. This is why cars don't last forever, even if it is possible in theory to maintain it in good condition forever. It is all a matter of math and math does not lie (just the assumptions used for the calculation can be wrong).

Depends, if the disease can be transmitted to other hosts and doesn't kill patient 0 in a reasonable time the economical advantage is nil, or even negative.

No unless your future net worth is less than the cost of the treatment.

Funerals can be expensive...

Funerals are a given, so they make no difference.

Years of tax payments lost. Sometimes socialised healthcare costs are actually not costs.