From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rafal@smigrodzki.org)
Date: Wed Aug 13 2003 - 13:20:59 MDT
Peter McCluskey wrote:
> 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 $10 million
> of typical hospital spending to produce an expected savings of one
> life.
### If you look at estimates of QALY cost for various procedures, you will
find that the cost varies between 2$ and 2 000 000$, depending on the
procedure. If the hospital already paid for all the cheap methods of
prolonging lives, indeed saving a million dollars by letting a child drop
dead would be the wrong thing to do. However, even in the US, and certainly
in the majority of hospitals in the world, a million dollars properly used
could buy more than 70 QALY, and thus should not be inefficiently invested
in this one young person, to the detriment of others.
Rafal
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