>When faced with a terminal illness, medical professionals, who know the limits of modern medicine, often opt out of life-prolonging treatment. An American doctor explains why the best death can be the least medicated – and the art of dying peacefully, at home
To be clear, there are a few different kinds of health care along multiple dimensions, like
- price
- expected mean utility (as measured in quality adjusted life-years gained)
- variance of utility (which I am ignoring here)
I am saying that at current state of technology, if we exclude the expensive stuff with near zero or even negative utility, the remaining demand for big items fits an insurance model rather well.
Yes, I agree that we should probably do more preventive interventions---like exercise, decent nutrition, vaccinations, etc. These are mostly cheap.
And even though they are good for people already, the insurance company might very well decide to just pay for them (and perhaps even pay people extra on top with discounts etcs to nudge them even more) to save itself money in the long run.
EDIT: There's of course also expensive treatments that provide a lot of quality adjusted life years, but the need for these are more like a lottery. (Eg treatment after a car accident or massive burn, or certain treatable cancers.)
See eg http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/feb/08/how-doctors-c...:
> How doctors choose to die
>When faced with a terminal illness, medical professionals, who know the limits of modern medicine, often opt out of life-prolonging treatment. An American doctor explains why the best death can be the least medicated – and the art of dying peacefully, at home
To be clear, there are a few different kinds of health care along multiple dimensions, like
- price
- expected mean utility (as measured in quality adjusted life-years gained)
- variance of utility (which I am ignoring here)
I am saying that at current state of technology, if we exclude the expensive stuff with near zero or even negative utility, the remaining demand for big items fits an insurance model rather well.
Yes, I agree that we should probably do more preventive interventions---like exercise, decent nutrition, vaccinations, etc. These are mostly cheap.
And even though they are good for people already, the insurance company might very well decide to just pay for them (and perhaps even pay people extra on top with discounts etcs to nudge them even more) to save itself money in the long run.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year
EDIT: There's of course also expensive treatments that provide a lot of quality adjusted life years, but the need for these are more like a lottery. (Eg treatment after a car accident or massive burn, or certain treatable cancers.)