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Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

I am not advocating any course in particular.

But I will observe that when such treatments become available, such conditions become a marker of lower socioeconomic class and the people with the conditions get treated less well by society.

This is why we need a better healthcare system.

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It's hard to imagine a treatment cost so high that it wouldn't be worth the USG paying for it. Down syndrome kids and adults have some quantifiable economic cost; normal adults are worth some other quantifiable economic benefit; the difference is going to be significantly more than the cost of treatment.

It's hard to imagine a treatment cost so low that the USG would pay for it.

Medicaid is 9% of the Federal budget.

Was.

the us government is often driven not by cost/benefit analysis, but by the horror of someone poor getting something without "deserving" it

>Republicans are often driven not by cost/benefit analysis, but by the horror of someone poor getting something without "deserving" it

FTFY

The US government is not one person or a small set of people with a coherent strategy making decisions based on cost-benefit analysis. It’s an extremely complex emergent system whose properties can only be understood by studying them empirically, not by appealing to arguments about what a human would think is worth it or would make sense.

Another statement that I would have simply accepted as fact a year ago, but now I believe is false. The US government is now primarily one person, and occasionally a small set of people, making cost-benefit decisions on what will benefit themselves more. The complex system is mostly gone, soon to be washed away, in favor of layers of patronage and favoritism. Much simpler.

That is not true. Lots of things Trump wants the government to do have not happened (random example: stopping the grant of birthright citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants and other non-permanent residents), precisely because he does not fully control it. Maybe he will someday, but he doesn’t yet.

This isn't responsive to my comment.

I believed they interpreted your post as pointing out the straightforward cost-benefit analysis (with an implication that it seems likely that we’d end up behaving according to that analysis). And they are pointing out that our government often doesn’t behave in a way that is compliant with a straightforward analysis.

It doesn’t seem like a very out-there interpretation of your post, maybe it is wrong, though. In particular the implication that I’ve got in parenthesis is, for sure, reading between the lines and maybe wrong.

But I don’t really get the response of “This isn’t responsive to my comment.” It doesn’t seem to move the conversation forward or clarify anything. Seems like a dead-end. What’s the point?

I don’t think I entirely disagree with your position. However, positioning my kid (and others with DS) in opposition to “normal” makes it hard to engage respectfully. As a parent of one typically-developing child and one with Down syndrome, I feel qualified to say they both come with quantifiable economic costs. Quantifiable economic benefits are pretty far in the future for both of them (they’re 11 and 8, if it helps ground my points).

> It's hard to imagine a treatment cost so high that it wouldn't be worth the USG paying for it.

Given that this is also true of universal health insurance and the US government also doesn't pay for that...

They (we) do, just for groups that incur the highest medical expenses on average. Why we can't just open up Medicare to all is beyond me, adding on the portions of the population who are on average the healthiest (and who are already paying for the people on it) would not push up the cost significantly.

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