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Logical Extremes?
16 years ago
General
I always like to think of logical extremes that ideologies can take. It helps put things in perspective and is effective in arguing against the "slippery slope" idea.
Simply take an ideology and imagine if it were allowed to manifest unfettered to the utmost extreme that it is capable of.
One that I came up with, as a result of current healthcare scares, is the logical extreme of for profit medicine. Take into account everything you can think of that would be beneficial to this idea and remove anything detrimental. The extreme I have come to is that eventually people would need to use their own organs and tissue as collateral for insurance. Think of it as a reverse mortgage but instead of on your house, its on your liver. Add to this a push to sell drugs that keep a person's health stagnant but not curing anything. Mandated drug treatment, no consumer protection and covert manipulation of health education to prevent the average person from keeping their costs down. I can't think of an extreme more than that scenario.
Or perhaps take something more tangible than an ideology, like an animal for example. What is the logical extreme for say... a cow? Perhaps it would be an immobile animal that merely sucks up nutrition from a feeding pool while dropping off meat tumors and likewise discarding bladders full of milk for later retrieval.
Did I mention this kind of stuff can make for interesting art and story settings?
What are some logical extremes you can come up with?
Simply take an ideology and imagine if it were allowed to manifest unfettered to the utmost extreme that it is capable of.
One that I came up with, as a result of current healthcare scares, is the logical extreme of for profit medicine. Take into account everything you can think of that would be beneficial to this idea and remove anything detrimental. The extreme I have come to is that eventually people would need to use their own organs and tissue as collateral for insurance. Think of it as a reverse mortgage but instead of on your house, its on your liver. Add to this a push to sell drugs that keep a person's health stagnant but not curing anything. Mandated drug treatment, no consumer protection and covert manipulation of health education to prevent the average person from keeping their costs down. I can't think of an extreme more than that scenario.
Or perhaps take something more tangible than an ideology, like an animal for example. What is the logical extreme for say... a cow? Perhaps it would be an immobile animal that merely sucks up nutrition from a feeding pool while dropping off meat tumors and likewise discarding bladders full of milk for later retrieval.
Did I mention this kind of stuff can make for interesting art and story settings?
What are some logical extremes you can come up with?
lol, pay me no mind. I'm just not in the mood to think as deeply as you do right now.
Insurance companies are, ideally, supposed to act as a negotiator between clients and medical professionals to get a good price. However, because these insurance companies aren't checking on the information they're paying extreme amounts and passing it on to their customers.
Then again, it's the medical field that's scamming the insurance companies in the first place, and they can't be trusted to be honest when dealing with customers directly either.
Although the hospitals will often give those who don't have insurance the insurance company rate after the procedure, it still inflates the list price. Most hospitals can only lower the cost to someone down to the insrance company's costs after the procedure but not before. Many people don't know that the hospitals are usually more than willing to slash the cost if you had uninsured health care, but this still ruins one's credit because the hospital usually can only do so legally by marking the debt as "settled" instead of "paid in full".
Insurance companies love this system because a procedure that costs them only $6000 but has a list price of $12,000 means they can treat the procedure as if they were charged $12,000 to the insured. If you have an insurance policy forcing you to pay a percentage of the health care after a certain price, this makes it easier for the insurance company to defer costs to you even though you have not cost the insurance company the amount they say you did.
I never saw that show x.x
No, I see the logical extreme of this being something else.
If hospitals themselves are susceptible for for-profit health care, that's an obvious logical extreme. It would get to a point where people treated as customers. In order to maximize profits, you must cut your base costs and increase your selling price. This results in the hospitals and other medical shops hiring less talented doctors willing to work for a lower costs, as well as skimping on the upkeep of equipment and such.
In addition, you want to maximize the amount of customers. To accomplish this, the main solution is to keep the masses unhealthy but placated. Make them highly susceptible to illness, so that they will inevitably come, and then force them to pay exorbint fees. And the easiest way to do this would be to cultivate a culture of unhealthiness by doing things like stunting the teaching of nutrition in health classes and other such things.
In short, a vicious cycle of unhealthiness would be instilled for the sake of getting more 'customers' to pay for hospital stays.
according to the few paragraphs I got knowledge about, people in the novel would have genes worth millions of dollars sold in the internet
I just forgot the name of the book >.> damn!
but I think I get your point... is it anything like that movie of the island? owo
reminds me of that story - cant remember the title - people 'grown' on a farm to be harvested for their organs.
I like your moral journals mifmaf
However, if people refuse to pay their life-long fine any longer, RepoMan is sent out to hunt the person down and extract the organ from their body in any way he can. Living or dead.
But seriously, check it out. It was only released last year. Great film.
Why save power, we'll just end up hurling people into the sun eventually. See there's an illogical extreme, there is no correlation between the hypothesis and the extreme :P
A short story called Total Loss.
Summary:
Health insurance companies start using cost-benefit formulas like auto insurance companies, when somebody is terminally ill, and the cost of their treatment will exceed the value of their remaining organs, they're written off as a total loss, and put on minimal treatment to manage pain until the end. That's the normal cace, and most written off as a total loss are brain dead, or so far into senility they might as well be brain dead.
Enter the protagonist and his wife, she has recently signed up with a new insurance company, since she has been hired into a new law firm, and her husband is a dependent on that policy. After two payments, he breaks his leg, and the cost of treatment exceeds the total premiums paid so far, so he is written off as a Total Loss, and the insurance company will be coming for his viable organs in two weeks. The couple and their doctor are now in a race to find some way to save his life, by digging through the 10,000 page insurance contract....
I won't spoil the ending, but the story really makes you think.
... and heads of lettuce with a chicken egg inside.
which came first: the chicken, the egg, or the lettuce? :P
Concepts like this (not the health care one, but the extremes) creep into the RP that Carotte and I do. It's how you end up with asylums empowered to commit relatively harmless skunks to a lifetime of restraint "for their own safety", for example.