Re:Teeth Whitening and the Hygiene Hypothesis
by rosser on Sunday August 02, 2015 @03:07PM
(#9991941)
Treating the cost of saving a life as a cost is a completely different question than treating it as an investment. Human lives have value, in and of themselves, irrespective of whether or not sinking some number of dollars into extending them can — let alone should — be "earned back".
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Re:Teeth Whitening and the Hygiene Hypothesis
by sokoloff on Sunday August 02, 2015 @03:13PM
(#9991973)
Whatever you call it, the value that patient N derives from cost C needs to be compared to the value that patient N+1 would derive from that same cost C.
When the NIH (or equivalent) turn that into a C/expected number of years, they're doing a scarce resource allocation problem. Unless you have infinite resources to give every patient every available treatment, you have to do allocation somehow.
Giving a 10-year old a treatment that you'd deny a 90-year old seems perfectly sane and rational to me.
I can't tell if you're agreeing with the concept and just disagreeing with the terminology, or if you believe there's a fundamentally better way?