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I totally agree that research can and likely will take technology in unexpected directions. Well, it will providing we continue to support research (including basic research and not just applied research) sufficiently with both dollars and fresh, new minds.

However, if we rob the Peter of research to create the Paul of ICU stadiums, the breakthroughs and discoveries we so greatly need will be far, far less likely to happen. And, if they DO occur, it will be more likely that they will be elsewhere, in France, or Japan, etc.

On fusion, et al, those unfulfilled (so far, I’ve yet to totally give up on my flying car!) predictions show best the need NOT to rob research and that the best chance for better health care is NOT to build Dana’s ICU stadiums but to work on new stuff (like nanobots, or something). It is the NOW that has the zero sum game of high end health care. I’ve yet to see any argument that would suggest that it is anything but that NOW. It seems to me that those who argue hottest that it is NOT a zero sum game do not really understand what one is well enough to recognize one. I confess to a math degree and an MBA, and I think it is one.

Technology seems to have gone in directions we never could have guessed. Take the computer on which you are working, for example. Each of us has more computing power on our desk at home than the entire NASA space program probably did in 1969 when we went to the moon.

I can now buy an 8GB miniturized hard drive that fits into the Compact Flash slot on my PDA, which itself has more computing power than did the lunar spacecraft that went to the moon in 1969.

Designer drugs created by manipulating genetic materials are other examples.

On a less serious note, as a pilot, and seeing what I see every day on my 32 mile commute to work, I’d have to say I’m pretty thankful the pundits were wrong, at least regarding flying cars. I can only imagine if the bozos I see on the roads were in the air … We’d be spending most of our time on the ground just trying to avoid the falling wreckage.

No, all the would-be scientists and researchers are lined up as care-givers and equipment minders in the new ICU stadiums Dana and Al had built.

Oh, and I’m still waiting for my flying car that pundits in my teens said would be there for all by 2000. Also, remember fusion? It’s ten years away, so they say, but they’ve been saying that same thing for over two decades.

Know you of technology, not?

In the short run, your thought would not help, unless you think college freshmen are ready to step in like a horde of Doogie Howsers:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096569/

It takes years to get to MDs.

In the long run, your thought would simply shift the zero game somewhere else. Not enough nukes so burn more coal or have so many blackouts as to kill off folk that way. The coal smoke now puts more in the hospital anyway. Or, perhaps no one to fly jet airplanes, or maybe to design them. No physics nobels or even too few to advance nanotechnology, or maybe even to maintain what we have now.

Your comment is analagous, IMHO, to saying that one can shelter forever under a stand of trees in a rainstorm w/o getting wet. After all, when the water finally drips down through the leaves of the tree you’re standing under, one can simply shift to stand under a different tree.

No society can defeat a zero sum game in an area like ultra high end health care without massive sacrifices many other places. Without multiple breakthroughs in research in areas like aging and regeneration and nanotech – which by the way we’ll never get if everyone is huddled around ICU stadiums – what we call now ultra high end health services will always be a deep in a zero sum game.

This is a crime against humanity. The state must instead do everything in its reasonable power to see to her well-being. Otherwise, we are all walking dead–not citizens, but chattle owned by a mob.

I am so sorry, but is ALWAYS a zero sum game when there is a finite number substantially less than the potential users. It’s math; it’s real world; and it’s just the way it is. The situation is oft blurred when the items are low end, such as when the care is not too much more than routine. For example, if we were talking of regular routine checkups, or maybe even routine trauma resources. This is ICU stuff, Dana. We’re talking brain wave monitors, 24/7/365 high level care, ventilators with backup on call ….

I wish you were right, but I also want to visit Yellowstone and not as a condo-gigaplex. I also want to drive a car ….

And if any state did legislatively determine the value of π to be 22/7, it was probably in Pennsylvania!