I've had to use the CDC lab to figure out a drug-resistant Trichomonas infection. Lots of very skilled people at that facility and this is a bad one to lose; it was the only lab that did those sorts of tests. There's not enough money in it for commercial labs.
It is so very important that we all understand this: not everything worth doing is profitable. Not everything which creates value for the economy or protects society is profitable. A system that expects all worthwhile things to be profitable will simply fail to do all worthwhile things and society will be worse for it. That society may appear to be functioning but it will not be the best society possible.
> A system that expects all worthwhile things to be profitable will simply fail to do all worthwhile things and society will be worse for it
I agree with the spirit of your message, but you're going way too far using all there. Some are not profitable, and the society is likely better off to socialize these. As a simple example: it's not profitable to provide food and housing for people without means, but if you don't, your society will be worse off - simply because these people will be forced into directions that are generally harmful to your living spaces.
Sure, you could increase police presence in this particular example, but that'd still be an effective socialization, because now you just put them on jail, which is even more costly then just providing them housing and food.
Medical is pretty much the worst of both worlds. It generally isn't profitable and you need some of the most skilled personnel in the world to perform it. Thus, it is nigh impossible to socialize in the same way you can at least attempt to create shantytowns or gangs as socialized substitutes for enforcement and housing
Where does "it generally isn't profitable" come from? The US healthcare system has many flaws, but lack of profitable medical facilities doesn't seem to be one of them.
General healthcare is a very ordinary market. You want to go to the doctor once a year to get checked out, they send your blood to a lab to check your cholesterol etc., you pay them money for this. If they find some condition with a known treatment, you pay for the treatment. In case the treatment is very expensive, you buy insurance ahead of time.
The reason people hate it is that people are willing to do anything in order to not die, so they want that level of resources to be available to them, but they don't actually want to pay anything, or to be denied if they decline to pay an extraordinarily large amount, because the alternative is death. But "pay a lot of money or people die" is the nature of it. You can try to paper over it with insurance or taxpayer subsidies but that trade off is inherent and that it makes people uncomfortable doesn't change the fact.
"These people" who, uncared for, are "generally harmful to [our] libing spaces" are part of us; we are here alive together, and I help out my fellow humans because it feels part of being a good human, not to avoid discomfort.
The article mentions something about resistant strains; that's going to be low volume, so high upfront investments for a one time result. In theory, I'm not an expert.
But this is the problem with capitalism and health care, the providers just stop if there's not enough money in it for them.
> But this is the problem with capitalism and health care, the providers just stop if there's not enough money in it for them.
Is this supposed to be a flaw?
If the cost of a lab is $500/patient then the patient (or their insurance) pays the $500 and the lab exists. If the cost of the lab is $50,000,000/patient, the lab probably shouldn't be funded, because its cost/benefit ratio is very bad and the same money could have saved more lives by putting it somewhere else.
What would you do in the alternative? Have the government provide unlimited funding for things that cost more than they're worth?
STDs spread. It's not just the one patient who benefits, is it? Fantasize about people not spreading STDs all you want, it came from somewhere and can go further. Public health isn't just the one person.
> STDs spread. It's not just the one patient who benefits, is it?
You're making the case that the market would have the incentive to provide these things because the insurance company would rather pay for an expensive test than have a larger number of claims if the disease spreads.
Exactly this. If it's a novel test, it might cost $50,000 a person to do the test, while if it's mainstream and your doing millions, it might cost $50. Doing the test on one person at $50k may prevent you from ever having to reach the scale where you can do it for $50 (but have millions of infections).
Your example is far more complex. The scenario he provided is easier to grapple with.
The patient (or whoever is paying the bill) and the provider determines the "worth". If they can't agree on a price, then it's not worthwhile.
In communism, would you really want to extract the equivalent of $50m of labour and resources in order to provide one person with this test? I can't imagine how that would be affordable.
Putting a monetary price on it in order to quantify the cost doesn't fundamentally change the equation. In the communist utopia I imagine it would be more like forcing x architects, engineers and builders to construct the facilities for the testing, x researchers and scientists to develop and conduct the test, x caregivers, plumbers, cleaners, drivers, baristas, chefs, etc for x weeks to provide this "free" test for one individual. Is that "worth" it?
>In communism, would you really want to extract the equivalent of $50m of labour and resources in order to provide one person with this test? I can't imagine how that would be affordable.
if it means me and all my people can one day not get STD's, yes. 50m is a steal. Medcine is one of the few fields like tech where the solution is very hard to come by, but extremely scalable once it is derived. It should be the most important aspect to focus on if you want future RoI. Even if it's the indirect cost of your citizens (or you) not dying of some disease.
we don't think of STDs as deadly, but apply it to cancer and the value is obvious.
> In communism, would you really want to extract the equivalent of $50m of labour and resources in order to provide one person with this test? I can't imagine how that would be affordable.
You don't need to invoke the boogeyman of "communism", in advanced developed societies there's plenty of examples of expensive treatments being provided to the edge cases of healthcare because it's such a minuscule amount of people suffering from these illnesses that on the overall scheme of things it's not a huge burden to society to allow someone to live if they have a chance.
Before you bring it up: yes, of course it's not perfect, of course some people do not get access to some treatments but it's overall a much better outcome than leaving people to fend for themselves and pay for treatments inaccessible to any non-millionaire.
If your only morality is through economic/financial terms I really invite you to question why you think that way, there are many other ways to think of trade-offs for providing access to specialty life-saving treatments even if it's at a cost to society, it just depends on what you think should be valuable. To me, life is valuable, and if a society can support giving more treatments at a loss to create less suffering it's a good society.
> But this is the problem with capitalism and health care, the providers just stop if there's not enough money in it for them.
That's precisely the question, isn't it? In the case of medical treatment, you decide. Do you want to run a test if it costs you $500? What if it's $50,000,000? Or, in practice, you decide ahead of time by choosing how much insurance to carry, and then it's the premiums on insurance that would cover $50M tests that probably isn't worth it to you.
You might then have concerns about people who can't afford a reasonable amount of insurance, but that's a question of whether the government should provide insurance subsidies to the poor, not a question of who decides how much is worth having. Do you even want someone other than yourself deciding the most that can be spent on saving your life?
> What's the RoE on the military or poetry, for example?
Defense and copyright are tragedy of the commons. Everybody wants there to be a military force to fend off invaders but the benefits redound to everyone, including people who don't pay. People have the incentive not to pay as long as someone else is covering the cost, but then since everyone has that incentive it would end up under-funded. As a result there is a law requiring everyone to pay.
The way things like that ought to work is that there should have to be a separate vote by the general public in order to increase the budget for that specific department. Then bloated budgets get voted down because the public can see when they're excessive.
Medical facilities aren't a tragedy of the commons. You pay for one if you need it and if there are enough people who need one to pay for it to exist, it does. If there aren't, by what reasoning should it? The people paying are the same people using it and they don't value it by as much as it costs.
> Medical facilities aren't a tragedy of the commons. You pay for one if you need it and if there are enough people who need one to pay for it to exist, it does. If there aren't, by what reasoning should it? The people paying are the same people using it and they don't value it by as much as it costs.
So if you have a very rare disease which might cost a lot more to treat because there's no economies of scale you are... Not worth it? Your life is unworthy because it's unprofitable to save you? Or your mom, dad, sibling, loved one?
You need to be very, very deep into pure inhumane financial thinking to even consider this as a good outcome for a society. Please die if it's too expensive to care for you, it's economical eugenics.
> So if you have a very rare disease which might cost a lot more to treat because there's no economies of scale you are... Not worth it? Your life is unworthy because it's unprofitable to save you? Or your mom, dad, sibling, loved one?
How could it possibly be otherwise?
Never mind $50M, suppose it would cost twenty trillion dollars to save you. The large majority of the entire US GDP. The majority of everyone in the whole country, ignoring all other problems and lives to dedicate all of their time to saving you. And if they did that, they could; but not otherwise.
Is that worth it? No, it can't be, because a million other people would die instead. There exist things that are possible but not reasonable and some of those things are in medicine.
You're asking a philosophical question about what is still fundamentally an economics problem.
Suppose we have a program which is saving lives for $50M each. There are other ways to spend the money that would save lives for $10,000 each. If we have $50M, should we save one life or 5000? This is not an academic trade off, it's what actually happens whenever the government allocates money to something with poor cost/benefit because there actually are ways to save lives or do other highly valuable things for even less than that amount of money and we don't have unlimited resources.
Yes. If Salk had this mentality, then Polio may stand up there with cancer and AIDS as one of the big 3 killers. Instead, he spread the solution and its nearly eradicated in the world. we might have also tried to monetize the COVID vaccine and grind the US into an early depression with that kind of thinking.
>What would you do in the alternative?
Fund the science and make use of taxpayer money to advance society instead of giving billionaires tax cuts. You'd think a community focused on tech would undersand that you can't treat skilled thinking the same way as an assembly line.
> If Salk had this mentality, then Polio may stand up there with cancer and AIDS as one of the big 3 killers.
If Salk had this mentality, the patent still would have expired after 17 years and he could have used the money to try to cure cancer or AIDS.
> we might have also tried to monetize the COVID vaccine and grind the US into an early depression with that kind of thinking.
Three different companies developed a COVID vaccine and it's not the kind of market where you can make more money by charging a million dollars each to a hundred people than by charging $100 each to the insurance companies of a billion people.
> Fund the science and make use of taxpayer money to advance society instead of giving billionaires tax cuts.
"Giving billionaires tax cuts" is not the only alternative use for the money and isn't even necessarily a worse one.
If someone is a billionaire because of regulatory capture and monopolistic practices then we shouldn't be giving them anything, we should be breaking up their companies and eliminating the laws they bought to concentrate the market.
If they're a billionaire because they built an honest company that employs thousands of people and makes useful products for reasonable prices, that's the thing that gives the government anything to tax in order to provide roads and schools and provides people with jobs and goods and services. We want more of that. Taking more of the money away should only be done if the government's use for it is high value. Which, by definition, things with a poor cost/benefit ratio aren't.
I believe it is of the "there's only one lab in the world that does this kind of thing" variety. Testing and various services for extremely rare diseases.
The millionaires in city center penthouses I have orgies with and sometimes meet in the spaceship-like waiting room of the fancy dermatologist in my home city and I say no.
This feels similar to the Reagan administration’s approach to the HIV epidemic, and for similar reasons. This will disproportionately impact men who have sex with men, and I have very little doubt that that’s the point.
And, likely, it will eventually hit everyone harder than it should, because of this administration’s misconception that it’s only an issue for that community they hate.
No, there's a couple of idiots in charge whose policy is being shaped by outside forces that literally want to destroy the country. This isn't some attack on a social issue.
This is a goal against the entire human race. The details are in the article. To summarize, they were collaborating with the rest of the world through WHO. And this isn't the only one either. I see scientists and archivists scrambling to save valuable information from the portals of CDC, NOAA, etc.
But then again, I don't see how a trade war against the world is going to "Make America Great Again" either. It is much more likely to do the opposite.
Promote Christian values; abortion is bad, and STDs have the stigma of promiscuous behaviour. Treating STDs and having abortions available encourages promiscuity.
(not my views, oversimplified take on fundamentalists and project 2025)
If we look back in time we find that promiscuous behavior and dangerous back-alley abortions existed well before STI treatment and safe, legal abortions.
But no, I don't value "chastity" or -- to phrase it more accurately -- denying women control over what happens with their own bodies.
If pro life people really cared that millions of babies were murdered every year there would be assassinations against abortion providers and bombings of clinics.
It's about pushing Judeo-Christian morality. Punishing women for having sex outside the goal of procreation.
This has the same goal, STDs are a punishment for loose morals. Preventing or curing them works against that punishment.
If pro-life people really cared about babies they'd put more effort into making sure they were fed and cared for after they were born instead of decrying any programs meant to help. Or about the mothers suffering medical complications because they can't have their non-viable fetus aborted. Pro-life is generally code for pro-birth.
> If pro life people really cared that millions of babies were murdered every year there would be assassinations against abortion providers and bombings of clinics.
Are you claiming there aren’t any?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence#United_...: “In the United States, violence directed towards abortion providers has killed at least eleven people, including four doctors, two clinic employees, a security guard, a police officer, two people (unclear of their connection), and a clinic escort.
[…]
According to statistics gathered by the National Abortion Federation (NAF), an organization of abortion providers, since 1977 in the United States and Canada, there have been 17 attempted murders, 383 death threats, 153 incidents of assault or battery, 13 wounded,[I 30] 100 butyric acid stink bomb attacks, 373 physical invasions, 41 bombings, 655 anthrax threats, and 3 kidnappings committed against abortion providers.
[…]
According to NAF, since 1977 in the United States and Canada, property crimes committed against abortion providers have included 41 bombings, 173 arsons, 91 attempted bombings or arsons, 619 bomb threats, 1630 incidents of trespassing, 1264 incidents of vandalism, and 100 attacks with butyric acid ("stink bombs")”
I completely disagree with the parent post's politics but he's right-- abortion providers are frequently compared to Hitler and regularly come out with higher numbers too. If these are your true beliefs, you are a coward for not taking action.
Is there something wrong with the practice of abstinence, or marital fidelity?
I mean, sex inevitably causes babies: it’s an incontrovertible but inconvenient truth for the modern urban human species. But we were designed that way, yes?
Not if you choose that, but there is a problem attempting to coerce people into it by cutting off any fundings of STD research. And as for yourincontrovertible truth, many people have vasectomies or have contraceptives, so babies aren't actually an inevitability.
is there something wrong with drinking? depends on your culture, if we're being honest. There's no obvious benefit to your body to drink in the 20 century or later.
unlike drinking, we have quite a few ways to enjoy sex without having babies.But some of those methods can still cause STDs. a vasectomy won't save you from herpes.
That's the wrong question to ask under these circumstances, since nobody else is imposing their beliefs on you and preventing you from practicing those.
The real question is, must sex invariably lead to pregnancy when there are known ways to prevent it? Because that's precisely what you're trying to impose on others. Your answer is clear from your comment. But it's completely illogical.
Nothing in the laws of nature say that humans or any other creature can't use their creativity to disrupt the natural order of things to make life more comfortable. To my knowledge, no other creature uses fire to cook food. Yet, human digestive system is uniquely adapted to that. And other animals don't cultivate food on the scale that humans do. Many of the food crop species won't even survive without human effort. I also don't see many other animals using clothes or money. So are you ready to give up those unnatural things - cultivated and cooked food, clothes, money and all modern technology?
The same goes for vaccine - the natural way of diseases is for children/people to simply die on a massive scale. What's the point of going through that when we have a way of preventing it? Why must it be any different for contraception and treatment of STDs?
The real issue here is the imposition of certain beliefs and moral values that are stale by a few millennia on an unwilling population.
Hey pal I don't want to alarm you but the people opposed to STD treatment think you are a disease and want to eradicate you. They think LGBTQIA+ identities are a social contagion that must be protected from. Project 2025 wants to criminalize queerness as obscenity so that existing in public will be a sex crime. Coincidentally, they have a criminal law plan that calls for the execution of sex criminals.
I fully agree with that logic, and further think that the government should also not be subsidizing risky behavior through funding for STD treatment and prevention. People should get private insurance based on a lifestyle questionnaire to ensure that all costs are being appropriately allocated based on one's risk profile. If it turns out that it's significantly cheaper to be in a long-term monogamous relationship, well, then that's just the invisible hand of the market at work!
Risky behavior... of having sex? Do you think anyone getting cancer should just pay for it themselves instead of society working to treat everyone of cancer? Do you think we should have taken premiums on our insurance to get COVID Boosters?\
>If it turns out that it's significantly cheaper to be in a long-term monogamous relationship
1. Why are we applying the invisible market to our bodies? Do you understand how dehumanizing that is?
2. monagamous relationships can still get STDs. Despite the name, some can also be spread by simple skin contact. So don't shake the wrong person's hand, I guess.
Yeah. Daddy is cancelling all that unnecessary and expensive insurance so you can have a higher allowance. Why were we paying for that anyway?
Also, all those so-called "experts" with their agendas are out on their asses where they belong! The private market is sufficiently incentivized to keep their workers healthy and develop treatments for whatever ails them.
Besides, we all know that if you just live a proper, completely monogamous lifestyle, you can't get an STD. Why should Trump voters pay for those that fall ill to their own sexual deviance?
Take your pick from these (and likely more) lines of reason.
Whether this will actually benefit Trump voters is an exercise left to them, but so far they seem to think it will.
I just read a story about a young Trump voter who died a gruesome death because she wasn't allowed to have her foetus aborted/evacuated after it died naturally inside her and started rotting. She was waiting eagerly for her baby and had even named her. So much for 'pro-life'!
Meanwhile, the private companies are so incentivized to protect their workers' health that even employed people are dying of diabetes because they still can't afford insulin - something unthinkable in other countries! Insulin injections are so old and cheap to manufacter at this point. Did you forgot to mention that the employees must also be rich? And what about jobless or homeless people?
Meanwhile, about 68K people die annually of preventable diseases because their insurance claims on essential treatment get turned down by insurance companies against their doctors' determination. And that isn't charity money - it's what they paid the premiums for. How many of those thousands will be saved if you cut STD treatments, contraceptives and abortions nationwide?
There are less developed and more conservative countries in the world who know better. I don't understand how such obviously dangerous decisions can be spun as benefits for the masses!
There's a mentality that isn't uniquely American, but definitely permeates the culture, and it explains why people would support something like this against their own interests. It has facets with some combination of:
* Rugged individualism: I stand on my own as an upright citizen made morally righteous by my (or my ancestor's) contributions. I have never needed nor would have accepted welfare (and all the welfare I actually did accept was not actually welfare and was mine by right).
* Moral indignation: there are freeloaders, scammers and grifters everywhere that are unfairly dependent on the welfare state. There's little agreement on who these freeloaders are, other than it's not the wealthy or powerful or people like themselves.
* Religiosity: America was founded as a Christian country and should return to its roots. Often, all the bad things happening in America are God's punishment, the work of the devil, or the natural consequence of wickedness and deviance.
* Anti-intellectualism: Book learning and higher education are just a program of radicalization to promote moral relativism and unjust authority of "elites", and a "culture war". Moreover, all the intellectuals/elites are equally suspect, even those that claim to be helping everyone by advocating for environmentalism, cures and prevention of disease, sound economic policy, social advocacy, etc.
* A desire for positional authority, both above them and for themselves: A sense that people that are rich or powerful are rightfully so. The pastor of your church is the positional moral authority. Your boss is the positional fiscal authority. The police are the criminal authority. The supreme court is the positional judicial authority. The president is the positional executive authority. A father has positional authority over his children. And (unstated), "real Americans" have positional authority over marginalized groups. Any sense that the authority must be earned, maintained or justified is rejected.
> Do these nationalists always dismantle their nation
That's a very interesting premise.
I can think of a few counterexamples (Franco in Spain, for all the atrocities committed by his regime, Spain unquestionably progressed economically), but in general yes, nationalists are disasters when in power. Of course it doesn't help that often, especially nowadays, the nationalism is just a wrapper for a bunch of grifters that say whatever is needed to get into power (Farage, Le Pen, Trump, Orban, PiS, Putin). So they're just gifting for personal benefit (which explains the dismantling), advertised as nationalism because that convinces the masses.
Yet they have also gotten involved in a very destructive war that destroyed their fossil fuel markets, made them a pariah and wasted their Soviet heritage military arsenal. Would not count it as development.
I've been casually watching Moderna's progress towards a herpes vaccine which IIRC was supposed to come out in 2028.
Herpes is one of those things that obviously isn't as big a deal as cancer but it would be nice to be one less thing to worry about when having sexual encounters with new people, and sufferers of it would love to have some sort of relief from infections and the elimination of the stigma around it. It's also associated with Alzheimer's disease so the cost of not producing this vaccine might be hundreds of billions of dollars and years of life and the prevention of so much suffering down the line.
It's really dismaying to know that this kind of stuff might not come to fruition because of the combination of incompetence and intentional chaos.
I have a weird interest in herpes as a casual reader of medical research papers and there's definitely many studies that found links between herpes and neurological issues, I believe it's a much more serious problem than society perceives it as being.
Society over perceives it in fact (otherwise there wouldn't be such strong stigmatism), but there may well be unknown effects.
I believe many infections both sexually transmitted and otherwise have understudied neurological effects. It wasn't until the widespread wrath of long covid that public discussion really kicked off.
Public and private sector science have historically been enmeshed by design.
Public sector medical research has been decimated in recent months, so adverse effects on products developed by private entities is an unfortunate byproduct of that.
ehh, I'll generally assume good faith until shown otherwise. I don't really flag something unless it shows active malice.
In this case, it was a good opportunity to educate others who may also think that the private sector wouldn't be affected by these public sector cuts. That's much better than flagging a comment that may have been simply made in ignorance.
I've had to use the CDC lab to figure out a drug-resistant Trichomonas infection. Lots of very skilled people at that facility and this is a bad one to lose; it was the only lab that did those sorts of tests. There's not enough money in it for commercial labs.
“There's not enough money in it for commercial labs.”
== government’s duty
How is there not enough money in it? Do only poor people get these sorts of issues? Serious question, no shade on poor people.
It is so very important that we all understand this: not everything worth doing is profitable. Not everything which creates value for the economy or protects society is profitable. A system that expects all worthwhile things to be profitable will simply fail to do all worthwhile things and society will be worse for it. That society may appear to be functioning but it will not be the best society possible.
> A system that expects all worthwhile things to be profitable will simply fail to do all worthwhile things and society will be worse for it
I agree with the spirit of your message, but you're going way too far using all there. Some are not profitable, and the society is likely better off to socialize these. As a simple example: it's not profitable to provide food and housing for people without means, but if you don't, your society will be worse off - simply because these people will be forced into directions that are generally harmful to your living spaces.
Sure, you could increase police presence in this particular example, but that'd still be an effective socialization, because now you just put them on jail, which is even more costly then just providing them housing and food.
Medical is pretty much the worst of both worlds. It generally isn't profitable and you need some of the most skilled personnel in the world to perform it. Thus, it is nigh impossible to socialize in the same way you can at least attempt to create shantytowns or gangs as socialized substitutes for enforcement and housing
Where does "it generally isn't profitable" come from? The US healthcare system has many flaws, but lack of profitable medical facilities doesn't seem to be one of them.
General healthcare is a very ordinary market. You want to go to the doctor once a year to get checked out, they send your blood to a lab to check your cholesterol etc., you pay them money for this. If they find some condition with a known treatment, you pay for the treatment. In case the treatment is very expensive, you buy insurance ahead of time.
The reason people hate it is that people are willing to do anything in order to not die, so they want that level of resources to be available to them, but they don't actually want to pay anything, or to be denied if they decline to pay an extraordinarily large amount, because the alternative is death. But "pay a lot of money or people die" is the nature of it. You can try to paper over it with insurance or taxpayer subsidies but that trade off is inherent and that it makes people uncomfortable doesn't change the fact.
"These people" who, uncared for, are "generally harmful to [our] libing spaces" are part of us; we are here alive together, and I help out my fellow humans because it feels part of being a good human, not to avoid discomfort.
I think that the usage of all perfectly agrees with you, actually.
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The article mentions something about resistant strains; that's going to be low volume, so high upfront investments for a one time result. In theory, I'm not an expert.
But this is the problem with capitalism and health care, the providers just stop if there's not enough money in it for them.
> But this is the problem with capitalism and health care, the providers just stop if there's not enough money in it for them.
Is this supposed to be a flaw?
If the cost of a lab is $500/patient then the patient (or their insurance) pays the $500 and the lab exists. If the cost of the lab is $50,000,000/patient, the lab probably shouldn't be funded, because its cost/benefit ratio is very bad and the same money could have saved more lives by putting it somewhere else.
What would you do in the alternative? Have the government provide unlimited funding for things that cost more than they're worth?
STDs spread. It's not just the one patient who benefits, is it? Fantasize about people not spreading STDs all you want, it came from somewhere and can go further. Public health isn't just the one person.
> STDs spread. It's not just the one patient who benefits, is it?
You're making the case that the market would have the incentive to provide these things because the insurance company would rather pay for an expensive test than have a larger number of claims if the disease spreads.
Exactly this. If it's a novel test, it might cost $50,000 a person to do the test, while if it's mainstream and your doing millions, it might cost $50. Doing the test on one person at $50k may prevent you from ever having to reach the scale where you can do it for $50 (but have millions of infections).
Who determines "worth"? What's the RoE on the military or poetry, for example?
Your example is far more complex. The scenario he provided is easier to grapple with.
The patient (or whoever is paying the bill) and the provider determines the "worth". If they can't agree on a price, then it's not worthwhile.
In communism, would you really want to extract the equivalent of $50m of labour and resources in order to provide one person with this test? I can't imagine how that would be affordable.
Putting a monetary price on it in order to quantify the cost doesn't fundamentally change the equation. In the communist utopia I imagine it would be more like forcing x architects, engineers and builders to construct the facilities for the testing, x researchers and scientists to develop and conduct the test, x caregivers, plumbers, cleaners, drivers, baristas, chefs, etc for x weeks to provide this "free" test for one individual. Is that "worth" it?
>In communism, would you really want to extract the equivalent of $50m of labour and resources in order to provide one person with this test? I can't imagine how that would be affordable.
if it means me and all my people can one day not get STD's, yes. 50m is a steal. Medcine is one of the few fields like tech where the solution is very hard to come by, but extremely scalable once it is derived. It should be the most important aspect to focus on if you want future RoI. Even if it's the indirect cost of your citizens (or you) not dying of some disease.
we don't think of STDs as deadly, but apply it to cancer and the value is obvious.
> In communism, would you really want to extract the equivalent of $50m of labour and resources in order to provide one person with this test? I can't imagine how that would be affordable.
You don't need to invoke the boogeyman of "communism", in advanced developed societies there's plenty of examples of expensive treatments being provided to the edge cases of healthcare because it's such a minuscule amount of people suffering from these illnesses that on the overall scheme of things it's not a huge burden to society to allow someone to live if they have a chance.
Before you bring it up: yes, of course it's not perfect, of course some people do not get access to some treatments but it's overall a much better outcome than leaving people to fend for themselves and pay for treatments inaccessible to any non-millionaire.
If your only morality is through economic/financial terms I really invite you to question why you think that way, there are many other ways to think of trade-offs for providing access to specialty life-saving treatments even if it's at a cost to society, it just depends on what you think should be valuable. To me, life is valuable, and if a society can support giving more treatments at a loss to create less suffering it's a good society.
> But this is the problem with capitalism and health care, the providers just stop if there's not enough money in it for them.
That's precisely the question, isn't it? In the case of medical treatment, you decide. Do you want to run a test if it costs you $500? What if it's $50,000,000? Or, in practice, you decide ahead of time by choosing how much insurance to carry, and then it's the premiums on insurance that would cover $50M tests that probably isn't worth it to you.
You might then have concerns about people who can't afford a reasonable amount of insurance, but that's a question of whether the government should provide insurance subsidies to the poor, not a question of who decides how much is worth having. Do you even want someone other than yourself deciding the most that can be spent on saving your life?
> What's the RoE on the military or poetry, for example?
Defense and copyright are tragedy of the commons. Everybody wants there to be a military force to fend off invaders but the benefits redound to everyone, including people who don't pay. People have the incentive not to pay as long as someone else is covering the cost, but then since everyone has that incentive it would end up under-funded. As a result there is a law requiring everyone to pay.
The way things like that ought to work is that there should have to be a separate vote by the general public in order to increase the budget for that specific department. Then bloated budgets get voted down because the public can see when they're excessive.
Medical facilities aren't a tragedy of the commons. You pay for one if you need it and if there are enough people who need one to pay for it to exist, it does. If there aren't, by what reasoning should it? The people paying are the same people using it and they don't value it by as much as it costs.
> Medical facilities aren't a tragedy of the commons. You pay for one if you need it and if there are enough people who need one to pay for it to exist, it does. If there aren't, by what reasoning should it? The people paying are the same people using it and they don't value it by as much as it costs.
So if you have a very rare disease which might cost a lot more to treat because there's no economies of scale you are... Not worth it? Your life is unworthy because it's unprofitable to save you? Or your mom, dad, sibling, loved one?
You need to be very, very deep into pure inhumane financial thinking to even consider this as a good outcome for a society. Please die if it's too expensive to care for you, it's economical eugenics.
> So if you have a very rare disease which might cost a lot more to treat because there's no economies of scale you are... Not worth it? Your life is unworthy because it's unprofitable to save you? Or your mom, dad, sibling, loved one?
How could it possibly be otherwise?
Never mind $50M, suppose it would cost twenty trillion dollars to save you. The large majority of the entire US GDP. The majority of everyone in the whole country, ignoring all other problems and lives to dedicate all of their time to saving you. And if they did that, they could; but not otherwise.
Is that worth it? No, it can't be, because a million other people would die instead. There exist things that are possible but not reasonable and some of those things are in medicine.
Okay Tina.
(In the words of Margaret Thatcher, there is no alternative.)
What are some non-money ways to value what we do for each other?
You're asking a philosophical question about what is still fundamentally an economics problem.
Suppose we have a program which is saving lives for $50M each. There are other ways to spend the money that would save lives for $10,000 each. If we have $50M, should we save one life or 5000? This is not an academic trade off, it's what actually happens whenever the government allocates money to something with poor cost/benefit because there actually are ways to save lives or do other highly valuable things for even less than that amount of money and we don't have unlimited resources.
>Is this supposed to be a flaw?
Yes. If Salk had this mentality, then Polio may stand up there with cancer and AIDS as one of the big 3 killers. Instead, he spread the solution and its nearly eradicated in the world. we might have also tried to monetize the COVID vaccine and grind the US into an early depression with that kind of thinking.
>What would you do in the alternative?
Fund the science and make use of taxpayer money to advance society instead of giving billionaires tax cuts. You'd think a community focused on tech would undersand that you can't treat skilled thinking the same way as an assembly line.
> If Salk had this mentality, then Polio may stand up there with cancer and AIDS as one of the big 3 killers.
If Salk had this mentality, the patent still would have expired after 17 years and he could have used the money to try to cure cancer or AIDS.
> we might have also tried to monetize the COVID vaccine and grind the US into an early depression with that kind of thinking.
Three different companies developed a COVID vaccine and it's not the kind of market where you can make more money by charging a million dollars each to a hundred people than by charging $100 each to the insurance companies of a billion people.
> Fund the science and make use of taxpayer money to advance society instead of giving billionaires tax cuts.
"Giving billionaires tax cuts" is not the only alternative use for the money and isn't even necessarily a worse one.
If someone is a billionaire because of regulatory capture and monopolistic practices then we shouldn't be giving them anything, we should be breaking up their companies and eliminating the laws they bought to concentrate the market.
If they're a billionaire because they built an honest company that employs thousands of people and makes useful products for reasonable prices, that's the thing that gives the government anything to tax in order to provide roads and schools and provides people with jobs and goods and services. We want more of that. Taking more of the money away should only be done if the government's use for it is high value. Which, by definition, things with a poor cost/benefit ratio aren't.
I believe it is of the "there's only one lab in the world that does this kind of thing" variety. Testing and various services for extremely rare diseases.
> Do only poor people get these sorts of issues?
The millionaires in city center penthouses I have orgies with and sometimes meet in the spaceship-like waiting room of the fancy dermatologist in my home city and I say no.
This feels similar to the Reagan administration’s approach to the HIV epidemic, and for similar reasons. This will disproportionately impact men who have sex with men, and I have very little doubt that that’s the point.
And, likely, it will eventually hit everyone harder than it should, because of this administration’s misconception that it’s only an issue for that community they hate.
>I have very little doubt that that’s the point
No, there's a couple of idiots in charge whose policy is being shaped by outside forces that literally want to destroy the country. This isn't some attack on a social issue.
It's both.
More "own goals" by the US in the fight against infectious disease.
See also:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/health/cdc-sti-lab-gonorr...
This is a goal against the entire human race. The details are in the article. To summarize, they were collaborating with the rest of the world through WHO. And this isn't the only one either. I see scientists and archivists scrambling to save valuable information from the portals of CDC, NOAA, etc.
Ugh, what a complete lack of regard for actual human lives aaaand the article gets flagged. What a mess.
Well, fuck. Or, on second thought, don't. You'll probably will die of super-syphilis.
Is there some benefit here for Trump voters?
I don't see it.
But then again, I don't see how a trade war against the world is going to "Make America Great Again" either. It is much more likely to do the opposite.
Promote Christian values; abortion is bad, and STDs have the stigma of promiscuous behaviour. Treating STDs and having abortions available encourages promiscuity.
(not my views, oversimplified take on fundamentalists and project 2025)
[flagged]
If we look back in time we find that promiscuous behavior and dangerous back-alley abortions existed well before STI treatment and safe, legal abortions.
But no, I don't value "chastity" or -- to phrase it more accurately -- denying women control over what happens with their own bodies.
People should have lots of sex! Sex is great!
Isn't the simple answer to that question just to look at history?
It is no coincidence that the rising availability of contraception coincided with the swinging 60s.
And what contraception facilitated the orgies of Roman times?
They did not follow modern Christian values. Sex was looked on differently, as was parenthood, and adoption.
Also, contraception did exist in those times.
Silphium? /s
If pro life people really cared that millions of babies were murdered every year there would be assassinations against abortion providers and bombings of clinics.
It's about pushing Judeo-Christian morality. Punishing women for having sex outside the goal of procreation.
This has the same goal, STDs are a punishment for loose morals. Preventing or curing them works against that punishment.
If pro-life people really cared about babies they'd put more effort into making sure they were fed and cared for after they were born instead of decrying any programs meant to help. Or about the mothers suffering medical complications because they can't have their non-viable fetus aborted. Pro-life is generally code for pro-birth.
> If pro life people really cared that millions of babies were murdered every year there would be assassinations against abortion providers and bombings of clinics.
Are you claiming there aren’t any?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence#United_...: “In the United States, violence directed towards abortion providers has killed at least eleven people, including four doctors, two clinic employees, a security guard, a police officer, two people (unclear of their connection), and a clinic escort.
[…]
According to statistics gathered by the National Abortion Federation (NAF), an organization of abortion providers, since 1977 in the United States and Canada, there have been 17 attempted murders, 383 death threats, 153 incidents of assault or battery, 13 wounded,[I 30] 100 butyric acid stink bomb attacks, 373 physical invasions, 41 bombings, 655 anthrax threats, and 3 kidnappings committed against abortion providers.
[…]
According to NAF, since 1977 in the United States and Canada, property crimes committed against abortion providers have included 41 bombings, 173 arsons, 91 attempted bombings or arsons, 619 bomb threats, 1630 incidents of trespassing, 1264 incidents of vandalism, and 100 attacks with butyric acid ("stink bombs")”
I completely disagree with the parent post's politics but he's right-- abortion providers are frequently compared to Hitler and regularly come out with higher numbers too. If these are your true beliefs, you are a coward for not taking action.
They are encouraged to use abstention, that way only Bad People get STDs.
Edit: I was going to say, also don't get raped, but then I remembered, only people asking for it, i.e., Bad People get raped.
Is there something wrong with the practice of abstinence, or marital fidelity?
I mean, sex inevitably causes babies: it’s an incontrovertible but inconvenient truth for the modern urban human species. But we were designed that way, yes?
Not if you choose that, but there is a problem attempting to coerce people into it by cutting off any fundings of STD research. And as for yourincontrovertible truth, many people have vasectomies or have contraceptives, so babies aren't actually an inevitability.
is there something wrong with drinking? depends on your culture, if we're being honest. There's no obvious benefit to your body to drink in the 20 century or later.
unlike drinking, we have quite a few ways to enjoy sex without having babies.But some of those methods can still cause STDs. a vasectomy won't save you from herpes.
That's the wrong question to ask under these circumstances, since nobody else is imposing their beliefs on you and preventing you from practicing those.
The real question is, must sex invariably lead to pregnancy when there are known ways to prevent it? Because that's precisely what you're trying to impose on others. Your answer is clear from your comment. But it's completely illogical.
Nothing in the laws of nature say that humans or any other creature can't use their creativity to disrupt the natural order of things to make life more comfortable. To my knowledge, no other creature uses fire to cook food. Yet, human digestive system is uniquely adapted to that. And other animals don't cultivate food on the scale that humans do. Many of the food crop species won't even survive without human effort. I also don't see many other animals using clothes or money. So are you ready to give up those unnatural things - cultivated and cooked food, clothes, money and all modern technology?
The same goes for vaccine - the natural way of diseases is for children/people to simply die on a massive scale. What's the point of going through that when we have a way of preventing it? Why must it be any different for contraception and treatment of STDs?
The real issue here is the imposition of certain beliefs and moral values that are stale by a few millennia on an unwilling population.
I'm gay, how does my having sex create babies?
But that's all beside the point, none of this is something the government should be acting to coerce. Abstinence is fine as a personal choice.
Hey pal I don't want to alarm you but the people opposed to STD treatment think you are a disease and want to eradicate you. They think LGBTQIA+ identities are a social contagion that must be protected from. Project 2025 wants to criminalize queerness as obscenity so that existing in public will be a sex crime. Coincidentally, they have a criminal law plan that calls for the execution of sex criminals.
I fully agree with that logic, and further think that the government should also not be subsidizing risky behavior through funding for STD treatment and prevention. People should get private insurance based on a lifestyle questionnaire to ensure that all costs are being appropriately allocated based on one's risk profile. If it turns out that it's significantly cheaper to be in a long-term monogamous relationship, well, then that's just the invisible hand of the market at work!
Risky behavior... of having sex? Do you think anyone getting cancer should just pay for it themselves instead of society working to treat everyone of cancer? Do you think we should have taken premiums on our insurance to get COVID Boosters?\
>If it turns out that it's significantly cheaper to be in a long-term monogamous relationship
1. Why are we applying the invisible market to our bodies? Do you understand how dehumanizing that is?
2. monagamous relationships can still get STDs. Despite the name, some can also be spread by simple skin contact. So don't shake the wrong person's hand, I guess.
Why are you having a debate here? People are trying to understand the benefit for Trump voters, they are not directly taking a position.
Abstinence and fidelity are good things, and so is curing diseases.
Nothing wrong with that. This is my practice as well.
But you seem to have a short-sighted view on what sex can be.
Yeah. Daddy is cancelling all that unnecessary and expensive insurance so you can have a higher allowance. Why were we paying for that anyway?
Also, all those so-called "experts" with their agendas are out on their asses where they belong! The private market is sufficiently incentivized to keep their workers healthy and develop treatments for whatever ails them.
Besides, we all know that if you just live a proper, completely monogamous lifestyle, you can't get an STD. Why should Trump voters pay for those that fall ill to their own sexual deviance?
Take your pick from these (and likely more) lines of reason.
Whether this will actually benefit Trump voters is an exercise left to them, but so far they seem to think it will.
I just read a story about a young Trump voter who died a gruesome death because she wasn't allowed to have her foetus aborted/evacuated after it died naturally inside her and started rotting. She was waiting eagerly for her baby and had even named her. So much for 'pro-life'!
Meanwhile, the private companies are so incentivized to protect their workers' health that even employed people are dying of diabetes because they still can't afford insulin - something unthinkable in other countries! Insulin injections are so old and cheap to manufacter at this point. Did you forgot to mention that the employees must also be rich? And what about jobless or homeless people?
Meanwhile, about 68K people die annually of preventable diseases because their insurance claims on essential treatment get turned down by insurance companies against their doctors' determination. And that isn't charity money - it's what they paid the premiums for. How many of those thousands will be saved if you cut STD treatments, contraceptives and abortions nationwide?
There are less developed and more conservative countries in the world who know better. I don't understand how such obviously dangerous decisions can be spun as benefits for the masses!
There's a mentality that isn't uniquely American, but definitely permeates the culture, and it explains why people would support something like this against their own interests. It has facets with some combination of:
* Rugged individualism: I stand on my own as an upright citizen made morally righteous by my (or my ancestor's) contributions. I have never needed nor would have accepted welfare (and all the welfare I actually did accept was not actually welfare and was mine by right).
* Moral indignation: there are freeloaders, scammers and grifters everywhere that are unfairly dependent on the welfare state. There's little agreement on who these freeloaders are, other than it's not the wealthy or powerful or people like themselves.
* Religiosity: America was founded as a Christian country and should return to its roots. Often, all the bad things happening in America are God's punishment, the work of the devil, or the natural consequence of wickedness and deviance.
* Anti-intellectualism: Book learning and higher education are just a program of radicalization to promote moral relativism and unjust authority of "elites", and a "culture war". Moreover, all the intellectuals/elites are equally suspect, even those that claim to be helping everyone by advocating for environmentalism, cures and prevention of disease, sound economic policy, social advocacy, etc.
* A desire for positional authority, both above them and for themselves: A sense that people that are rich or powerful are rightfully so. The pastor of your church is the positional moral authority. Your boss is the positional fiscal authority. The police are the criminal authority. The supreme court is the positional judicial authority. The president is the positional executive authority. A father has positional authority over his children. And (unstated), "real Americans" have positional authority over marginalized groups. Any sense that the authority must be earned, maintained or justified is rejected.
"Make America Great Again!" feels more and more like "hold my beer!" or "YOLO!".
> Is there some benefit here for Trump voters?
Sure, stuff like this will disproportionately affect gay men. The average Trump voter things homosexuality is a sin.
> Is there some benefit here for Trump voters?
They get to punish woke science. That's about how much thought they put it into. There's no 5-dimensional chess at play.
> They get to punish woke science.
Imagine how all the chemists who study cis/trans isomerization feel right now ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cis%E2%80%93trans_isomerism
As someone who studied an cis/trans isomerase decades ago in grad school, I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but not completely.
Another skill to cede to a foreign country i guess.
Do these nationalists always dismantle their nation?
> Do these nationalists always dismantle their nation
That's a very interesting premise.
I can think of a few counterexamples (Franco in Spain, for all the atrocities committed by his regime, Spain unquestionably progressed economically), but in general yes, nationalists are disasters when in power. Of course it doesn't help that often, especially nowadays, the nationalism is just a wrapper for a bunch of grifters that say whatever is needed to get into power (Farage, Le Pen, Trump, Orban, PiS, Putin). So they're just gifting for personal benefit (which explains the dismantling), advertised as nationalism because that convinces the masses.
Russia has unquestionably developed since the 90s, too. Unemployment in 1998 peaked at 13%, and the country was literally falling apart.
Now, only the parts outside the tier 1 cities are falling apart.
Yet they have also gotten involved in a very destructive war that destroyed their fossil fuel markets, made them a pariah and wasted their Soviet heritage military arsenal. Would not count it as development.
I've been casually watching Moderna's progress towards a herpes vaccine which IIRC was supposed to come out in 2028.
Herpes is one of those things that obviously isn't as big a deal as cancer but it would be nice to be one less thing to worry about when having sexual encounters with new people, and sufferers of it would love to have some sort of relief from infections and the elimination of the stigma around it. It's also associated with Alzheimer's disease so the cost of not producing this vaccine might be hundreds of billions of dollars and years of life and the prevention of so much suffering down the line.
It's really dismaying to know that this kind of stuff might not come to fruition because of the combination of incompetence and intentional chaos.
I have a weird interest in herpes as a casual reader of medical research papers and there's definitely many studies that found links between herpes and neurological issues, I believe it's a much more serious problem than society perceives it as being.
Society over perceives it in fact (otherwise there wouldn't be such strong stigmatism), but there may well be unknown effects.
I believe many infections both sexually transmitted and otherwise have understudied neurological effects. It wasn't until the widespread wrath of long covid that public discussion really kicked off.
Moderna isn't the government.
Public and private sector science have historically been enmeshed by design.
Public sector medical research has been decimated in recent months, so adverse effects on products developed by private entities is an unfortunate byproduct of that.
Just flag the 4 word comment that obviously wasn't made in good faith and move on.
ehh, I'll generally assume good faith until shown otherwise. I don't really flag something unless it shows active malice.
In this case, it was a good opportunity to educate others who may also think that the private sector wouldn't be affected by these public sector cuts. That's much better than flagging a comment that may have been simply made in ignorance.
a comment that consists entirely of x != y isn't made in good faith. It just isn't.
You're right about using it as a chance to educate others though.
If CDC, FDA, ACIP etc. are crippled,
a) it'd be very hard to release advanced medicine
or
b) it'd be very easy to release snake oil as medicine
and both scenarios would be very bad.
Moderna, like all modern hard-science companies, is a tiny house built on the top of hundreds of billions of dollars of government-funded research.
"this kind of stuff"
I think Herpes Zoster (shingles) vaccine already did a great positive impact on that front.
Though I agree, any advance against simplex would have been a big victory.