Why We Must Ration Healthcare by Peter Singer is an explanation of why fear of health care rationing is not a good reason to be against socialized medicine. The main point is that health care is already rationed in America, it’s just hard to point fingers here because the rationing isn’t being done by one central institution.

Remember the joke about the man who asks a woman if she would have sex with him for a million dollars? She reflects for a few moments and then answers that she would. “So,” he says, “would you have sex with me for $50?” Indignantly, she exclaims, “What kind of a woman do you think I am?” He replies: “We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling about the price.” The man’s response implies that if a woman will sell herself at any price, she is a prostitute. The way we regard rationing in health care seems to rest on a similar assumption, that it’s immoral to apply monetary considerations to saving lives — but is that stance tenable?

Health care is a scarce resource, and all scarce resources are rationed in one way or another. In the United States, most health care is privately financed, and so most rationing is by price: you get what you, or your employer, can afford to insure you for. But our current system of employer-financed health insurance exists only because the federal government encouraged it by making the premiums tax deductible. That is, in effect, a more than $200 billion government subsidy for health care. In the public sector, primarily Medicare, Medicaid and hospital emergency rooms, health care is rationed by long waits, high patient copayment requirements, low payments to doctors that discourage some from serving public patients and limits on payments to hospitals.

There’s no doubt that it’s tough — politically, emotionally and ethically– to make a decision that means that someone will die sooner than they would have if the decision had gone the other way. But if the stories of Bruce Hardy and Jack Rosser lead us to think badly of the British system of rationing health care, we should remind ourselves that the U.S. system also results in people going without life-saving treatment — it just does so less visibly. Pharmaceutical manufacturers often charge much more for drugs in the United States than they charge for the same drugs in Britain, where they know that a higher price would put the drug outside the cost-effectiveness limits set by NICE. American patients, even if they are covered by Medicare or Medicaid, often cannot afford the copayments for drugs. That’s rationing too, by ability to pay.

This post on cell phone photography finally cemented my decision to get a cell phone that can also function as a point-and-shoot camera. I actually like the crap quality photos that my current phone produces but I’d like to have more of a happy medium between my .3 megapixel phone camera and my 8 megapixel DSLR (sadly I no longer have the same drive that I did in high school, where I brought my SLR with me every single day and wore it around my neck most of the day…in many situations it feels overly obtrusive, delicate or serious, and other times I just can’t be bothered to lug it around). I’m hoping that this will help me get back into the habit of taking miore photos.

tags: philosophy, photography

Average starting salaries for college graduates by major: even Art beats philosophy.

Yet, our numbers are increasing.

tags: philosophy, webloggish

I came across a good example of pragmatist/philosophical thinking versus rationalist/Philosophical thinking in Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene.

…I remember attending a lecture given by eatrice and Allen Gardner about their famous “talking” chimpanzee Washoe (she uses American Sigh Language, and her achievement is of great potential interest to students of language). There were some philosophers in the audience, and in the discussion after the lecture they were much exercised by the question of whether Washoe could tell a lie. I suspected that the Gardners thought there were more interesting things to talk about, and I agreed with them. In this book I am using words like “deceive” and “lie” in a much more straightforward sense than those philosophers. They were interested in conscious intention to deceive. I am talking simply about having an effect functionally equivalent to deception.

The “more interesting things to talk about” part could be straight from Rorty.

tags: books, philosophy

…Similarly, “philosophy” can mean simply what Sellars calls “an attempt to see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term.”

– “Introduction,” Consequences of Pragmatism

So, taking class this summer hasn’t been a complete waste. I think I’ve realized that Rorty’s little-p useful philosophy, the kind that I am still enthusiastic about after last semester, is present in every discipline. Criminology and Microeconomics are perfect examples of this. I came across the American Bar Foundation recently, and the Becker Center. I am fascinated. Was it a mistake not to major in a social science? I don’t think so, but I’m not sure where this leaves me. Next semester would probably be a good time to take statistics. Survey design probably wouldn’t hurt too. I guess you have to do some boring work some time to get somewhere.

tags: philosophy, work

Richard Rorty, 75; Leading US Pragmatist Philosopher:

An heir to William James and John Dewey, Dr. Rorty advocated a philosophy known as pragmatism, which shunned what he considered a fruitless search to answer unknowable questions: What is the meaning of life? Do other people exist? He had rejected the field of analytic philosophy on the ground that it attempts to address those questions, which he largely considered a waste of time, and had created something akin to a hunt for timeless truths, another idea he strongly criticized.

His dismissal of analytic philosophy led some of his harshest critics, including Bernard Williams of Oxford University, to write that Dr. Rorty was a relativist who believed truth was dispensable. Dr. Rorty’s supporters saw an important distinction: that Dr. Rorty was carrying on the pragmatic tradition of seeing truth as something created by humans in their struggle to cope with the world around them and not simply eternal truths suddenly found by them.

Michael Williams, philosophy department chairman at Johns Hopkins University, said Dr. Rorty, one of his mentors, “taught the lesson there are no fixed and permanent foundations for anything, that anything could be changed. Where some see this as cause for despair, he saw this as cause for hope because it meant we could always do better. . . . He reveled in contingency,” what happens as a result of human progress.

Williams added: “Instead of trying to define the essence of human nature, Rorty thought we should creatively think up new possibilities for ourselves — what to be, how to live. He said we are not hostage to how things are. He spoke of pragmatism as a future-oriented philosophy.”

tags: news, philosophy

Today in class we were going over a quiz. One question involved an indifference map of cereal and milk. The indifference curves (three were pictured) were right-angled, indicating milk and cereal are perfect complements. Various points on the three curves were labeled, and the question asked us to select the points you would never pick not matter what the price level. And lots of people got confused by this, and instead tried to select the infeasible points based on the budget constraint line that was also part of the graph.

What the question was actually asking was for the labeled points which weren’t on the vertex of the indifference curves, because the vertex points were the only ones of optimal choice. (If you only use a cup of a cereal when a cup of milk is available to you and vice versa, units of one good are only worth anything to you insofar as you have an equal amount of units of the complementary good.)

Anyway, we were going over this problem, and one guy asked a question which indicated that he was confusing quantity and utility. That is, he got the answer wrong because he thought the “worst” point was the one with the smallest quantity of total goods, because of the assumption of non-satiation — that we would always rather have more than less. The trouble is that the “more” applies to utility, not number of luxury cars, or wads of cas.

I feel like this is why economics often gets a bad rap — because it seems like economic theory is all about maximizing profits and trying to consume the most possible. This makes it seem both narrowly applicable and depressing. But if you think about economic theory as a way of modeling how we all maximize utility in our daily life, it’s a different story. Non-satiation is a valid assumption in regards to utility. Everyone would rather be happier. But that doesn’t doesn’t mean because we have non-satiation of utility that we have non-satiation of anything else. In fact, utility is the only thing I can think of where it is realistic to assume non-satiation. Everything else — food, money, luxury cars, air, water — has diminishing marginal utility. The only reason that people are more greedy about money (hoard it up, want more than is necessary to live) is because they have tied the amount of money they have to their happiness and wellbeing — they have equated money and utility — which is fallacious.

tags: class, philosophy