[FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

[∄ uǝʃƃ]

$90k?  Wow.  I thought mine were expensive at $60k/dose. During each and every infusion, I kept spending those 5 hours, sitting in that chair, mulling it over *how* it could be worth that amount of money.  The amount of money spent on my treatment was astronomical.  The drug alone (in principle, I was on a clinical trial and didn't pay for the drug) would be valued at 30 months, 1 infusion each month ⇒ 30*$60k = $1.8 mil ... not including the chemo, CT scans, blood tests, hours put in by the nurses, etc. It's fairly difficult for me to justify.

It's easier to talk about my own inadequacy.  But the son of a friend of ours recently had a really really bad car accident.  He was in the ICU for ~30 days and just the 1st day in the ICU cost $51k.  They're now in debt to the tune of ~$2 mil from one car accident.  And, although he's moved all his limbs and his pupils are now dilating with the light, his brain is probably severely damaged. And even if he wakes up, he's facing a long recovery.  This friend of ours cleans houses for a living and, although they have some insurance, they have no idea how much of the bill it'll pay.

I suppose my point is that these numbers, $60k, $51k, $90k seem wrong to me in some ... ethical? ... sense.  When Republicans were fighting the individual mandate and equating car insurance with health insurance, it was (and is) very difficult to clearly express how *false* that equivalence is.  Anyone who doesn't grok it must not have had any experience with the healthcare system at all.  It's not as simple as the left-wing rhetoric of universal healthcare being some sort of human right.  The problem is way deeper and of much higher dimension.  Such things are just not reducible to the single dimension of dollars.

On 09/21/2018 10:55 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Just got bill at our house for a small bag of those engineered antibodies for a cool $90,000 US.   Things get more interesting when it is $900.  
> Technology does move that fast, e.g. this GPU comparison w.r.t. ray tracing.
> 
> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/nvidia-rtx-2080-and-2080-ti-review-a-tale-of-two-very-expensive-graphics-cards/4/


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