From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Wed Aug 13 2003 - 08:53:16 MDT
sentience@pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) writes:
>I believe that a hospital should not spend a million dollars to save the
>life of a five-year-old child, because if you take a million dollars away
>from a hospital, people are going to die. I would applaud the moral
I suspect you have a very inaccurate estimate of how productively
hospitals use their money. I'd guess it takes well over $10 million
of typical hospital spending to produce an expected savings of one life.
The hard choices are more likely to happen when the doctor says there's
a small chance that the $1 million will save the child. The doctor is
likely to overestimate his abilities, and the administrator could easily
overestimate his ability to save lives by putting the money to better
uses. So it's not clear that there's anyone who can be trusted to make
the right decision.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter McCluskey | "To announce that there must be no criticism of http://www.rahul.net/pcm | the President, or that we are to stand by the | President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic | and servile, but morally treasonable to the | American public." - Theodore Roosevelt
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