150,000$ Question

In an article on the healthcare reforms in the US, Greg Mankiw ask the following question:

“Imagine that someone invented a pill even better than the one I take. Let’s call it the Dorian Gray pill, after the Oscar Wilde character. Every day that you take the Dorian Gray, you will not die, get sick, or even age. Absolutely guaranteed. The catch? A year’s supply costs $150,000.

Anyone who is able to afford this new treatment can live forever. Certainly, Bill Gates can afford it. Most likely, thousands of upper-income Americans would gladly shell out $150,000 a year for immortality.

Most Americans, however, would not be so lucky. Because the price of these new pills well exceeds average income, it would be impossible to provide them for everyone, even if all the economy’s resources were devoted to producing Dorian Gray tablets.

So here is the hard question: How should we, as a society, decide who gets the benefits of this medical breakthrough? Are we going to be health care egalitarians and try to prohibit Bill Gates from using his wealth to outlive Joe Sixpack? Or are we going to learn to live (and die) with vast differences in health outcomes? Is there a middle way?”.

The question is spot on. It sets the debate on a moral / philosophical level. The economic considerations should not be set aside (information asymmetry, externalities, etc.) but they should not be the main focus when discussing such an important subject. Now, I’d answer Mankiw question with another one: Can we accept inequalities in terms of access to care while defining a minimal universal cover, which a pure private system fails to provide ?

Inspiration: Rationalité Limitée