X-Message-Number: 26027
From: "David Pizer" <>
Subject: Who pays
Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2005 10:51:34 -0700

Basie asked:
"About a month ago I was in the hospital for 5 days. The hospital bill was 
about $49000.00. This made me think. Who is going to pay the hospital bill 
in the future when a patient is taken out of suspension? Clearly unless 
there is money on the table no hospital is going to cooperate. Shouldn't 
there be medical insurance for the future?"


There is something better!


When Alcor collects the money for doing a suspension the money goes into two 
different pots (putting it simply).  Part of the proceeds go to pay for the 
actual preparation of the body, to get it protected from the cold of long term 
storage.  This is the cost of doing the standby, and the cost of the perfusion 
and getting the body cooled down and into the dewar.


The other part of the initial proceeds goes into the Patient Care Trust Fund to 
pay for keeping the patient stored over the long time that it will take for 
technology to be advanced to be able to reanimate the patient some day.  This 
fund is seperated from Alcor's regular funds and managed by a different set of 
people.  


The patients' trust fund money is not *used up* keeping the patient in storage.
But only some of the *interest* (or annual gain) from the principle is used to
keep the patient in storage, the rest of the interest goes back into the 
principle of the trust fund so that the principle should grow a little each 
year, so that more gain in the balance is created in each future year.  The 
trust fund keeps getting bigger because it keeps getting bigger.


All of the patients' money is pooled into one big pot.  It keeps growing every 
year and Alcor publishes those figures from time to time.


In this theory, there will come a time when a powerful technology is created and
most of the patients can be reanimated. That is the time when money may be 
needed to pay for this -- as your question asks about.  However we need to 
remember, if Alcor is reanimating the patients they also no longer need the 
money to keep the patients frozen at that time.  So they can use the trust money
to reanimate the patients.  If there is money left over, and I project there 
will be, that excess money might be used to help the newly reanimated patients 
get re-educated and back into socitey.



There is a second benefit to keeping the patients' money separate from Alcor's 
regular funds.  Some people think this seperation (and the conditions about 
managing it) create a wall of protection if Alcor should get sued:  Alcor has 
it's money and the patients have their money.  If Alcor screws up somehow, it 
doesn't seem right to take money from the innocent patients.



One might speculate that the cost of reanimating frozen patients will be very 
very small.  The technology expected to be used is not a labor-intensive 
technology like what you experienced in your 5 days in the hospital. Simply put,
perhaps it will merely consist of something like putting the patients in a big 
microwave-like device and at the same time introducing tiny nanobots that will 
do the work while, perhaps, a medical person looks in from time to time.


I mentioned above that I thought "most" of the patients will be reanimated some 
day.   Actually I believe that all the patients will some day be reanimated.  
However, there will be degrees of originalness that they contain.  Patients that
went into suspension with the most amout of their original brain well-preserved
will come out the most like they were when they went in.  Patients who had less
of their original amount of brain matter, original positioning, and intact 
structure preserved will need value-added technology to create a best guess at 
creating what is missing.  But we are all coming home some day.




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