Oh, sort of a Hobson's Choice for the liberals.  Excellent question.

No. The Gov sholuld help create an affordable health-care system to take care of people IF they get sick not to provide a mean to live long or even in perfect health. Only IF and When you get sick. This pill is what they call :quality-of-life medication. If you can afford it, get it yourself.

Why are you making affordable healthcare look like it is soooooo impossible and unfair? It is an insurance, like Car insurance. do you object to making car insurance affordable to everyone? I didnt say make it FREE. Just affordable cost for meaningful service. Is that really that bad an idea? No one is talking about bums and lazy people. The target are people who work, work very hard but still cant afford health insurance. There are soo many of them nowadays.

Why are you making affordable healthcare look like it is soooooo impossible and unfair? It is an insurance, like Car insurance. do you object to making car insurance affordable to everyone?

Right. Health insurance is like car insurance. I think that was his point, more or less. And no, he doesn't object to making health insurance or car insurance affordable to everyone.

But otoh, there seem to be those who, unlike you and Draginol, see the two as distinct and say that government must provide the one for free.

Well, here's another side the the magic pill question:

If the government were to buy the pill, do they have a right to FORCE you to take it?

To answer your question - they should, cos it would save them a lot of money, but they don't really need to.

I thought the point of the hypothetical was that the medicine was perfect yet perfectly unaffordable. So that would be $10,000 per month, per person, for the rest of their elongated lifespan. In that case, every year you extend my life would cost society $90,000.

One reason you might consider buying it is that technology might move on even farther. If you pay for this pill for everyone for ten years, they may come up with a new pill that's even better. You can't go back and give the pill to all the people you let die if you chose not to buy the first pill. Buying the pill en masse should help with profit incentives too (the free market would do better, though).

Here's one reason you might agree to have the government buy everyone the pill. You'd say, "Look at country A, where the people who couldn't afford the pill killed to get it, so no one rich is left. And look at country B, where those who could afford the pill imposed such harsh security conditions that no one who doesn't get it now will ever be rich enough to afford it. Wouldn't we be better off avoiding that conflict and cooperating? In 25 extra years maybe we could become rich enough to repay what we're demanding from the rich now."

This is assuming the extra 25 years are spent productively instead of lazily, and that human effort (rather than natural resources) continues to be the scarce element in economic growth. Actually, I bet you would get the 25 productive years up front. How hard would people work to make their stake and "earn their 25" before they died?

Here's just one concrete example of why bureaucratized "healthcare," whether corporate or governmental, leads inevitably to inefficiency and just won't work.

From a bulletin received by mail just today from UnitedHealthcare (another one of those outfits there to "help" us):

"Incorrect Submission in Loop 2010AA and 2010AB for Segment NM1, Data Elements NM102/NM103 of 837 Professional Claim Transaction May Cause Delays in Payment"

Thank God they put that in plain English or I might still be trying to figure it out.    

Multiply that single statement by several thousand procedure and diagnosis codes and it's a wonder anyone ever gets paid for providing services in good faith. These days, getting paid involves far more work than providing the service for which payment is sought. And if a claim is rejected just once, no matter what the cause or how trivial the technicality, there's no point trying to resubmit it - what "profit" was there is gone, eaten up by the cost of resubmission and the fact that 60 to 90 days have already gone by. It's this sort of bizarreness that has led to my decision to jump off this stupid treadmill and divorce my practice from insurance companies, a transition that will take 6-12 months. If I were forced to participate in a nationalized system, the rules for which will make the IRS regulations look like a summer beach read, as a condition of practicing medicine, I'd quit and go do something else, like be a drug rep; most of them make more money than me, anyway.

I usually fill the contrarian role on this blog, but I have to say that Brad's scenario leads where he wants it to -- don't buy everybody the drug.

To give it to every American would cost $3 trillion a month. It's impossible and there's no way "productive" extended lifespans could make up the cost.

I suspect the extra value of one year of life is not as high as $120,000, based on economic studies. A market solution would let people choose. I think a wino would rather have his taxes back to buy booze than another 25 years of a wino's life. Some people would rather have the 10-year pill and a hovercraft to spend those ten years jetting around on.

One thing that sucks about this is that rich people would get the pill, but they wouldn't necessarily "deserve" it. I mean, they weren't working harder all these years just so they could have the pill, because it didn't exist yet. Some people who made choices for a less driven lifestyle would have chosen to become rich if they had known about the pill, but the market incentives didn't foresee that. I guess they could take out loans to buy the pill, and "catch-up" on putting in the labor to buy it.