X-Message-Number: 4352 Date: Fri, 5 May 1995 10:12:03 -0400 (EDT) From: Robin Helweg-Larsen <> Subject: Government health care On Fri, 5 May -1, CryoNet wrote: > From: (MR RONALD SELKOVITCH) > > When David Stodolsky(#4217) made a minor reference to the advantages of > government owned hospitals it was denounced immediately > (#4227) as being politically motivated and inappropriate for this forum. > > Has any one dared to consider that a Socialized medical system may be more > sympathetic to Cryonics than the private system we have now. Isn't it > worthy of debate.We may very well have to deal with it in the future. > I agree. I subscribe to 2 non-cryonics magazines. As someone who teaches domestic and international business management, I far prefer the present and future world-views of The Economist (the struggle for affluence, peace, longevity, and better government in a complex world of group-forming and competitive humans), to the typical problems in Heavy Metal (the struggle for survival in a technologically advanced setting without good government - e.g. police state with no justice system, or post-nuclear anarchy, or whatever). Governments are (almost always) interested in providing good health care: after all, the people at all levels in the government also benefit from it, and that's a natural part of why people are interested in forming governments in the first place. Bureaucracies can be full of dead wood, waste, obstruction, etc; that's why we have to work for better governments. Government policies can be counterproductive, short-sighted, destructive, even murderous; but places with good (whether or not extensive) and competitive governments are freer and healthier places to live than places with bad, rigid, or nonexistent governments. As a non-American living in the US, I find the country amazingly dynamic, and this is reflected in the diverse, competing, highly fluid, highly responsive and rapidly evolving federal, state and local governments. This relates to the diverse regional attitudes towards euthanasia, cryonics, etc. A single, coherent government *could* promote cryonics, but, given cryonics' current lack of popular acceptance, would have to be a very unresponsive (i.e. totalitarian) government. The diverse, competing governments of the US are more likely to throw up local pockets of pro-cryonics approaches, and provide cryonics with the opportunity of winning the battle of ideas by demonstrating achieved results. Governments that have allowed cryonics to develop and flourish locally will then tend to become its active advocates in the national and international forum: partly because they have a home-grown product to be proud of, partly because their support-base includes their cryonicist party-workers, contributors and voters. Because American governments are highly responsive, you can make them your advocates or your enemies, depending on how you treat them. A concentrated population of cryonicists that lets local government know what its overriding priorities are (in terms of zoning needs, local hospital support, autopsy concerns, etc), a population that seeks out responsive elected officials and candidates, a population that votes, is likely to develop a pro-cryonics government, at first at the local level. Ultimately, assuming our understanding of the universe is reasonable, all governments will be as pro-cryonics as they are pro-hospitals, pro-anesthetics, pro-ambulances, pro-rescue squads, etc. For now, any pro-cryonics government would be an indescribably powerful tool. Optimistically, Robin HL Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=4352