Fun with Hypotheticals

Megan is too lazy to construct her own straw people these days, so she's outsourced to Arnold King:

Next, imagine that the best hope is a treatment that costs $100,000 and offers a chance of success of 1 in 200. Would I want her to get that treatment? Absolutely.

But look at the issue from a rational, bureaucratic perspective. You have to treat 200 patients at a cost of $100,000 each in order to save one life, for a cost per life saved of $20 million. Is that what a rational bureaucracy would do?

Yeah, that must happen all the time. Just recently drug trials showed that a new controversial treatment, which involves the killing of 100 kittens and has a one in a million chance to spontaneously reverse Earth's gravitational field, cures athletes foot for 1 in 12,354 people. They had a REALLY large sample size.

Of course, most of us would unhesitatingly take this risky treatment to cure athlete's foot. Sure the chances are slim, but wouldn't you do ANYTHING to alleviate the uncomfortable itching and burning sensation. Now, a one in a million chance of killing all life might not seem like a lot, but let's imagine a hypothetical. Imagine that every person on earth has athletes foot. Now imagine that Earth has 1000 times more people than it does. That would mean that 6 trillion people would need this treatment. Not only would we be forced to farm kittens (at the expensive of world saving tobacco peanuts wheat!) but the chance of catastrophic gravity reversal becomes almost certain. Clearly, if we had universal health care, gravity would reverse itself.

Megan realizes the direness of the situation and asks the tough questions:

Unless we're willing to let health care expenses grow unchecked, someone is going to have to think about costs. But so far in America, I see no means to develop a culture which will allow bureaucrats to deny potentially life-saving treatments simply because they're costly--either in the free market or in a single payer system. Thus, I predict, costs will continue to grow.

OK, there are no actual questions. I forgot she's an expert and hence all questions have been answered. It's true, though. I mean now, we don't worry at all about cost effectiveness. I went to the doctor for an ulcer the other day and he said that it was stress induced. When I told him that the stress in my life was due to work, family issues, girlfriends, friendships and the weather, he quickly wrote me a prescription for 50 actors/actresses to take over the roles of my personal network. He also got me on full disability and paid for a house in a small Caribbean island. It was a bit costly but since we never worry about the price of treatments, my HMO immediately authorized the procedure. Now my life is totally stress free and my ulcer is cured. I'd hate for socialized medicine to come in and start performing some kind of ridiculous "cost analysis" and ruin this all for me.