X-Message-Number: 22911
Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2003 11:17:27 -0500 (EST)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: standby scheme

James Swayze's well-intentioned proposal is a mixture of an
insurance scheme and a lottery. Since cryonics is coming
under regulatory scrutiny these days, I wonder whether the
scheme would attract unwelcome attention, since insurance and
lotteries are both heavily regulated activities.

In addition there are specific problems of implementarion.

1. Alcor members already have 3 days of standby built into
their funding. CI members don't. Alcor members therefore will
be less motivated to participate and will feel that they
should not pay the same amount as CI members, especially
since they have already paid higher annual dues and insurance
premiums for higher cryopreservation minimums.

2. You never get 100 percent of any group to participate in
anything. Consequently James's calculation of 1000 members
contributing $10 each per month is quite unrealistic.

3. There is no provision for the expense of collecting the
money. Even if it is done annually instead of monthly, the
administrative process would be nontrivial.

4. The last few years have seen more than one Alcor standby
per year. Add to this the number of CI cases where a standby
might have been justifiable, and the total is far more than
James's predicted one standby per year.

5. Older members in frail health will be much more motivated
to contribute to the plan than younger members in good
health, whose primary risk is accidental death, where no
standby is necessary or possible.

6. Overall, the scheme is a communitarian attempt to address
an individual problem. I think this is a bad idea in
principle, since it is a way of avoiding individual
responsibility.

I suspect this plan seems attractive (to some) because it
suggests you can get something for almost nothing. I can
imagine a person thinking, "I want a standby if necessary,
and I can't afford it, but hey, if *everyone* kicked in $10 a
month, I could get my standby!" Is that what ran through your
mind, James?

This of course is precisely the same fantasy that has fueled
many kinds of communitarian schemes, such as Medicare.
Naturally everyone wants to get something out of it (no one
wants to make all those payments for nothing). Thus the
scheme quickly becomes overloaded and ultimately must either
increase the monthly payments or must institute various kinds
of restrictions and caveats in order to stay solvent. We have
seen precisely this syndrome in HMOs, which are directly
comparable to James's idea. The HMO has to have "gatekeepers"
(this is what they are called) whose job is to turn people
away if their condition is insufficiently serious.
Inevitably, everyone ends up hating the HMO.

Face it: CRYONICS COSTS MONEY, and good service costs more
money. The field has been subsidized by donations and
bequests, giving the majority of members a discounted rate at
the expense of a minority. This is not a viable plan for the
future, and any attempt to provide even better service
without paying its full cost will make the situation
worse. Until cryonicists face the painful fact that they
must pay considerably more money to cover the real costs of
the service they receive (especially in standbys), cryonics
will not be financially viable in the long term.

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