Haha. An elderly friend of mine spent ~24 hours in an emergency room after breaking their hip recently. Save the innovation for after we resolve the universal health care access problem.
Yeah. Almost all innovation and economic improvement has only helped the upper classes and in many cases actually hurt the lower classes.
What is going to happen in America is a 40 year life expectancy gap between the rich and the poor. Rich kids will grow to 6'5" with 180 IQs and end any economic opportunity for poor families.
Not every first-tier (economically speaking) European or Asian country has a first-rate medical system but I think there are enough, so it must be logistics
or legal issues?
Japan and South Korea come to
mind for Asia. I’m guessing Germany and France still have first-rate care in Europe?
I am French, nothing in France today is comparable to the France of De Gaulle or d'Estaing.
You still can get good treatment in private clinics or in specialized centers such as Institut Gustave Roussy, but not in the average public hospitals which are constantly pushed to lower their costs, including by the “socialists”.
Overall, I don't think the situation is any better in France than in the UK or the US.
It is perhaps even worse than in the UK, for example in my small town of Saint-Malo, an elderly person lay on a stretcher in the emergency room for many hours and died there without seeing a doctor.
On average in France, 20 to 30 people die per month in the emergency room without having received treatment.
As the BBC article says, "The causes of France's healthcare crisis are complex, but the long-term pressure of an aging population alongside a shortage of medical staff"
It's true there were astonishing demographic changes, we went from a pyramid /\ to a column | | in 50 years. There are nearly as retirees than employees. This situation is not sustainable. And people are more and more upset.
We wouldn't need to emphasize a "golden age of medicine" if everyone had the same access to proper nutritional foods. Most of America is an utter food desert.
Read: not overprocessed, highly refined, ultra palettable shit.
A "golden age of whole foods" (not the corporation, actual food) would be better for everyone. Just not Big Pharma shareholders.
> We wouldn't need to emphasize a "golden age of medicine" if everyone had the same access to proper nutritional foods.
We still would. We still would have cancers, even with nutritional food. And we would still have pandemics like Covid-19 and even worse (see Black Plague). A lot more people would have died without vaccinations.
I don't think people realize how relatively easy it is today to have a healthy lifestyle.
Don't smoke, don't vape, drink a little and cook at home. There has never been a better availability of fresh produce everywhere in America and they have never been as cheap at they are. The big killers today are cardiac diseases, diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases. All of these three are mostly preventable.
An early 20's guy who follow these basic recommendations can be pretty certain to have a pretty nice quality of life.
>An early 20's guy who follow these basic recommendations can be pretty certain to have a pretty nice quality of life.
This is both delusional and horrible in the sense of being victim blaming. No amount of eating healthy and doing regular exercise helps you when bad luck gets hold of you. Lower probability of having a problem is flipping continents away from "pretty certain." Children's cancer wards exist.
They definitely do, and this is pure bad-luck. But go to a hospital today and take a look at the patient census: a great percentage of them have completely preventable diseases with the knowledge we have today. They (born in the 40's) didn't stand a chance as they lived through the rise of fast food and got hooked on cigarettes while it was believed to be safe. But it doesn't have to be the same for kids today.
>> basic recommendations can be pretty certain to have a pretty nice quality of life.
> This is both delusional and horrible in the sense of being victim blaming.
> when bad luck gets hold of you.
Bad luck can take you out when you're 5, as you mentioned, so I'm not sure what the point is in this conversation about statistically beneficial behavior.
Eating healthy, drinking in low amounts (including none) will put you in a bell curve of longevity leaning into the 70s and 80s, not give you a 100% certainty (this is the obvious interpretation of "pretty certain"). "bad luck", as you put it, takes you out of the normal distribution into a tail. What you mean by "delusional" or "victim blaming" isn't clear, as it does not apply, in context.
If by "pretty certain" you mean "not remotely certain" then sure. Empathy is a thing. I am having empathy with your lack of it and seeing how it could be due to your good health right now and lack of exposure to disease in your family. I wish you all the best with that continuing.
>> Lower probability of having a problem is flipping continents away from "pretty certain."
>> delusional and horrible in the sense of being victim blaming.
Sadly, one day, statistically speaking, you /will/ understand someone calling this attitude out without needing any empathy. If you're lucky it will be your own health rather than the more likely case of someone very close whom you love.
Definitely I recommend everyone try to follow healthy behaviors to reduce their chances of having particular health problems.
Until the stresses of life make you vulnerable, and you get depressed or anxious, start drinking heavily, start eating a terrible diet, and stop exercising, which ruins your health progress
> There has never been a better availability of fresh produce everywhere in America and they have never been as cheap at they are.
Sort of. Most grocery store produce in the US will have several days of shipping time and shelf time before being purchased, followed by additional storage time in refrigerators or fruit baskets. Additionally nutrient losses can be incurred when cooking with heat, which is also more frequent in modernity.
This can still result in substantial nutritional decline, and is often very significant in vitamins (especially vitamin C) that oxidize readily.
Absolutely not. That one study you're thinking about is confounded by having a social life, which is indeed healthy. Drinking alcohol is horrible for health.
Also if you don't leave your house, you reduce your odds of having an accident. If you don't move inside the house, you reduce your odds of slipping and hurting yourself.
If you want to have a cigarette, please go and do. If you are smoking 2 packs a day, you probably should change your job or country. But living a sterile life is death itself.
I'll believe it when I see it. Til then, I'm stuck with a pill pusher who charges me several hundred dollars for a 2 hour wait and a 15 minute consultation. A golden age tomorrow, emerging out of an environment today, where experimental chemicals are advertised directly to users in between scenes glorifying self destruction. A golden age will spring spontaneously out of this? Sure, I'm excited.
I've wondered if in the next 20 years they will learn to extend life 10 years, and in those 10 years learn to extend life 10 more years, and so on. We could be on the brink of human immortality and not even know it. It probably has to happen that way, some sort of exponential function pushes us into a singularity for life expectancy
And the process of scientific advancement. If science advances one funeral at a time, as the quote goes, the end of funerals is perilous for human advancement.
Also, wealth redistribution will need to be addressed if Rockefellers, Musks, and Bezos's are going to live in perpetuity.
I suppose we should add politics to the list. We're already plagued by political dynasties, e.g. the Clintons, the Bush's, the Kennedies. And it's common for senators and congresspeople to have de-facto lifetime tenure. Can you imagine still having Confederate veterans in the Senate today?
Extending life beyond 70-80s is not going to do anybody any favor unless you figure out something for aging. Old people are a liability and they serve no purpose other than emotional for your kids maybe. But someone barely living into his 90s with frequent visits to the clinic and on multiple supports (ie: need assistance for urinating) is not something enjoyable. At least from my point of view.
Bio-hackers and/or the wealthy. The best medicine will eventually become available to everyone who is a part of the global economy. At least it always has given enough time. In the last 25 years, more than a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty. The world is at 10% or less right now.
A glaring counterpoint is certain things like eyeglasses probably aren't universally available to everyone who needs them, but those industries WILL develop.
Eyeglasses are pretty common and can be dirt cheap, and testing requires only a ruler and a piece of paper with letters on it. One just needs to accept glass lenses and a chinesium frame, as all good manufacturers are bought out by Luxottica.
What are you referring to when saying that they're not universally available? Or are we including the people who don't even have access to water in this?
Looking at otherwise expensive country Finland. We can get 2 pairs of regular glasses for 29€ including eye check... Ofc, that is absolutely nothing fancy. It is surprisingly cheap when free market works.
That should be in range of what nearly everyone can save up here.
Yep, that's why I asked. Most of the developed and developing world can afford them. And i think 29 eur is actually quite pricy, if you want cheaper stuff you can probably go down to like... 4 euro?
I think there is cheaper online options, but 29€ for prescription glasses made to order isn't bad price. With customer service and them fitting them for you.
Standard reading glasses for example will be much cheaper again.
Yeah, I'm not so sure about this. It may be a "golden age" for medical innovation, but I have little expectation that this will reach anyone except for the ultra-wealthy.
Except medicine never stays with the ultra wealthy. It only usually makes sense as a mass market product. Unless by ultra wealthy you may mean entire populations of developed countries? Then yes maybe
I would expect an article title like this to be backed up by some dramatic increase in healthcare availability (like free healthcare in the U.S.) but no, it's just the people at the high end have access to better care than ever before. Hooray.
Nothing is free. Even where health care is extremely generously subsidized, there are tradeoffs. People over certain ages or in various categories are refused services, including life-saving ones like dialysis. Many of them pay to go to American hospitals for treatment.
Ultimately, the supply of healthcare is increasing, but still finite. The demand for healthcare is unlimited.
There are countries with universal health care (e.g. Spain) where you will never be denied any treatment, and it's "free" (obviously the active workforce pays a social security tax) and available to everyone.
Your claim is fundamentally impossible. Regardless of what kind of system is used to subsidize care, there’s still a problem of allocating limited resources. It’s always a tradeoff between prices (or levels of subsidization), eligibility requirements and, at the margins, waiting times.
The desire for health care is virtually limitless. Spain could literally spend its entire GDP on medical care and not meet everyone’s needs.
Eh, come on, don't give me some old article talking about anecdotes in exceptional times of crisis, just to substantiate your point about a system you've never experienced and have no clue about.
Except the high end will actually be the majority of the US population who don't have issues affording healthcare.
Would I like to make things better for the bottom third? Absolutely. Am I happy about progress made that will improve the life of the rest of us? Also yes.
I would say I make way more than the vast majority of Americans, and I still worry about medical expenses. Many insurance companies tend to either fight you on payments or force you to pay upfront and then reimburse, meaning a lack of significant cash on hand is a serious concern…
Unless you have at least $10k of liquid savings, you're one medical emergency away from bankruptcy. I have great employer sponsored healthcare and still had to pay around $1k for a kidney ultrasound that didn't find anything and a 30 minute zoom call with my PCP.
I'm a bit late replying but it depends what your out of pocket maximum is. Mine I think is $2000. It's usually high deductible health plans that have high maximums, generally I'd refuse to with for a place where that was all they offered.
Around 14% of people don’t have insurance in the US, of those that do, these new technologies are available to most people with insurance including Medicaid (for the poor) and Medicare (for the elderly).
And access to these technologies is much faster than most healthcare systems in the world.
“We may be on the cusp of an era of astonishing innovation”
One of us must have developed a flawed model of the world in which we live.
A lot of innovation starts off expensive then becomes much cheaper, and more prevalent, over time. Do we agree on this model? Electric vehicles, televisions, computers, DNA sequencing,…
The “astonishing innovation” developed today will be everywhere within a decade.
