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0.5.1

HealthCare

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They don't specifically mention this, but there's a strong analogy between the current US health care system and Peter Singer's "child in the pond" thought experiment, which compares coming across a child drowning in a pond; you're wearing a new, very expensive pair of shoes that cost, say, $200. Do you go into the pond, ruin your shoes and save the child? Sure you do! But would you spend, say, $50 to save the life of some child in a faraway country? Maybe not. But why? You're willing to in effect spend $200 to save the one child, but not $50 to save the other?

Our health care system, in this analogy, works far too often in a mode where it's saving a drowning child and paying $200 to do so -- when it could have spent $50 previously to make it so that the child never got into the pond in the first place. For example, we'll pay for a very, very expensive kidney transplant -- but won't pay for the primary care that might have prevented the patient's end-stage renal failure in the first place, which would have been much cheaper and safer for the patient.

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