Genetic Enhancments and society

[simply Nathan]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I believe your list to be largely false. We do not all start even and we all could not be healthy if we really wanted to. The slate isn't blank. Only improved understanding of genetics and physiology even has the potential to solve many health problems.

His list looks pretty solid to me. Nowhere does he imply that people don't vary genetically in medically meaningful ways, nor that improved understanding of genetics and physiology won't help in treating issues that come up.

But it won't help the economic situation of healthcare as it is now in the US, for the reasons he stated. The underlying problem there isn't that people get sick. It's actually really, really, complicated.

• Being treated for sickness is expensive outside many peoples' reach financially (I'm in debt for two years because my appendix burst last year)
• "Health insurance" policies to help pay are also often out of financial reach
• Medical care is priced as highly as it is partly from bad bargaining skills due to people leaving these things up to impersonal insurance companies to do the bargaining
• Doctors need to have expensive education and there's no room allowed for low-skilled medical professionals to operate on a budget; everything must always be top of the line with absolutely minimal risk
• * Doctors also need to take out insurance policies against their low but extant risk of failure
• * * These insurance policies follow the same politics as the others, but fewer people are immediately cognizant of them
• Politicians think they can fix some of these things by raising minimal standards of medical quality or bullying people who can't afford insurance into buying it or, barring that, spending tax money to insure people who didn't buy any
• * Ultimately that money has to come from somewhere