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. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=22911