If you think you or one of your loved ones might someday need a blood transfusion I would say that's positive value right there. Even if 100% of infected blood is screened out, Hep C decreases the available supply and that will have consequences downstream.

Maybe because that’s just you, a unique individual.

For a different unique case, such as someone who has Hep C, the utility value for the medicine could literally be everything for the person.

So, if we average the utility value for a whole population, the utility value would actually be pretty high, especially if a lot of people have Hep C.

I'm sorry, can you explain how we "average" the utility?

For me, it has zero value.

For another person, it saves their life, and they would pay literally anything they could.

How do we average that?

My hot take: We can't. Buy medicine in bulk, give it to people for free, progressive taxes to pay for it.

I like your take, but how are we going to enforce progressive taxation? The wealthiest firms escape taxation, at the moment.

We ought to tax wealth instead of income, and tax individuals instead of corporations. The nature of corporate wealth is that the generation of value is disconnected from the generation of cash. It’s impossible to fairly regulate the infinite shell games that result from this. The problem we are trying to fix is inequality of wealth, so we should tax wealth directly and not via proxies like corporate profits.

I can't pretend the answer is easy, but...

Starting with personal income tax, capital gains, and estate taxes would go a long way.

I think we really need to come up with an International version of the Uniform Commercial Code. And get money out of politics.

Yeah, you don't tear down his overall point with your anecdotal, n=1 case. It's the population average not N=1 average, that we care about in public health.