“a lot of America’s ridiculously expensive healthcare is a result of inefficient use of resources, and dodgy incentives, and such things. ”
Given Alcor is based in the US, and has to rent time and labor from the medical profession writ large, I’d suggest that overcoming those obstacles would indeed result in a fairly substantial savings for them. Alcor is small enough to suffer rather heavily from inefficient use of resources—they do maybe 10 vitrifications per year, but have to have the staff and supplies ready to go 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Also, the idea that doubling your size decreases costs by 10% is plausible, but dubious over 17 doublings.
I’d honestly conclude “insufficient information” here. The history of computers in the last few decades makes a mere tripling in productivity look excessively pessimistic. On the flip side of the coin, equipment and labor costs run in to hard limits. I can certainly see a 200% productivity increase being optimistic, but I can also see it being pessimistic. Since I don’t know, it felt safest to just run the numbers as current research suggests, without adding new assumptions :)
That said, the best defense I can give for those numbers is that I was trying to be optimistic, because my starting assumption is that there’s no way you’re going to finance universal cryonics in today’s political climate. I didn’t want to throw myself up against an easy version of the problem :)
Given Alcor is based in the US, and has to rent time and labor from the medical profession writ large, I’d suggest that overcoming those obstacles would indeed result in a fairly substantial savings for them. Alcor is small enough to suffer rather heavily from inefficient use of resources—they do maybe 10 vitrifications per year, but have to have the staff and supplies ready to go 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
I’d honestly conclude “insufficient information” here. The history of computers in the last few decades makes a mere tripling in productivity look excessively pessimistic. On the flip side of the coin, equipment and labor costs run in to hard limits. I can certainly see a 200% productivity increase being optimistic, but I can also see it being pessimistic. Since I don’t know, it felt safest to just run the numbers as current research suggests, without adding new assumptions :)
That said, the best defense I can give for those numbers is that I was trying to be optimistic, because my starting assumption is that there’s no way you’re going to finance universal cryonics in today’s political climate. I didn’t want to throw myself up against an easy version of the problem :)
Recently Alcor has started to rely more on a veterinarian to do the surgery. She charges less money than the MD surgeon they’ve often used.