There's a clear divide, those who say "Everyone made it out thats a good mission" and those who say "You wasted millions for one guy! Ha!" because they can't comprehend that one pilot is worth multiple aircraft in training alone. Same with Ukraine. The loss of an Abrams or a Leopard 2 sucks but when the crew lives the based Z trad warriors talk about the cost of the machinery and not the crew that made the machine work.
The other thing to consider is that in the volunteer army its double true, but even with a draft on - not everyone is cut out for being a fighter pilot, especially a modern one. It takes a high level of physical and mental fitness, and you don't just leave candidates that have proven themselves for the sand people to find.
It costs more than a hundred million to train one pilot? I don't think that's accurate, though I understand the PR and morale value of a rescue mission like that. It also seems a bit simplistic to say "third worlders don't value human life, unlike Americans" when that money could have been put in healthcare to save many more lives.
First see @dragg 's post.
I had occasion to get familiar with the work of some researchers. When talking with one of the scientists, he told me that he had developed a treatment protocol for an extremely rare pancreas disorder that had a patient count of an estimated 700 global affectees, and had to live with the fact it would never reach any of them.
- First, the protocol had been proven in lab and rat trials but no further. Even if this disorder suddenly became virulent somehow, it would talk the better part of the decade for human trials. No drug company would pick that up for 700 patients.
- Second, even if they had something approved for use in humans, the protocol (which was a mix of vitamins, a specific enzyme-replacement, and then a low-risk surgery to remove some growths from the pancreas.) took about a year and even when we leave off the surgergy, the enzyme replacement had to be small-batch synthesized by hand several times a week for injection, and had to be turned every week by monitoring urine.
It was very likely you could make a refrigerator-stable version to let medical staff tune the dose, and almost certain it could be made into a pill as a similiar enzyme was, but that would take hundreds of millions of dollars, but until that investment was made you would be looking at a couple million dollar treatment.
- third, the disorder affected mostly people in Africa (leading to a likelyhood of an enviromental factor - aka nutrition) and the research concluded: the disorder was about the body not making enough of a specific enzyme. In early life, the body mostly compensated by making more other enzymes or other in-cell processes, and it only manifested in later life by an increased likelyhood of pancreatic cancer as well as a few comorbidities, like increased impact (but not chance) of diabetes, from the pancreas developing non-cancerous tumors (that might turn cancerous).
this all boiled down to a sad truth: it very likely the patients would die of other causes before this pancreatic disorder became a contributing factor let alone a primary factor in their eventual death.
-Fourth, a large factor in estimating patient count (and potentially why it was so high in Africa) was the fact most of the cases were discovered post-mortem via pathologist desriptions of the deceased pancreas. In Africa, the doctors-with-out-borders types would get a patient with no medical records so would have to go into each case nearly completely blind, which meant a lot more CAT scans of things like the pancreas where they could see the non-cancerous lesions. So by checking medical records for people in the west who had died with (but not necessary from) the disorder, and from complaints from the living patients in Africa, they had a rough guideline of what to look for: Diabetes symptoms in excess for blood-sugar, particularly issues with vision and need for removal of digits/limbs.
- Fifth factor was impact. The disorder had a rather mild but noticable effect on quality of life. You'd have out of whack hormones and would have diabetes like symptoms early, as well as a few other issues I forget from a 'weak pancreas'. As long as your pancreas growths didn't go cancerous, it was unlikely to kill you. So, the treatment protocol is filed away in NIH waiting for it become economically viable.
So what this boils down to is when you are told "We need more money for dem medical programs" its not saving hundreds or thousands or lives like you're told.
those programs aren't helping the working poor. They are helping hoodrats and illegals, mostly with dialysis because they let their diabetes get so bad their kidneys failed. And what they want isn't "life saving" dialysis so much as more dialysis becasue they haven't changed their lifestyle an iota.
Most of "we need more medical money!" goes to medical missions to third-world countires because their governments would rather build vanity projects and fund leaders' swiss bank accounts. I don't care about the third world, or illegals.
For the US, medical providers are not allowed to turn away critical patients regardless of ability to pay, and any nation wide medical provider has programs to handle low-income patients.
During the Obamacare drug price increase (to bilk insurance), every drug manufacturer had a patient hotline. If you called them with no insurance and a confirmed prescription (of you had insurence and were being raped by copays), they would basically mail you a coupon for free drugs becasue they didn't want the PR hit of people dying because they sent drug costs to the moon now that the feds were paying whatever they wanted to charge.
My doctor would usually fill my scripts in his office from drug samples sent by Pfizer and the like.
I have said this before and will say it again:
Insane bills are because the hospital has to charge everyone the same rate. Normal people aren't expected to pay those prices, insurance is. Simply asking for the hospital financial aid department and asking for an itemized bill will usually drop your bill 25-35%. There are "needs based" programs with higher income limits than you'd think that will effectively give you grants to reduce you bill for their services. Entering into a payment plan at a non-profit hospital will usually see your debt waved in year or two due to how their bookkeeping works.
edit: Additionally, medical debt is fully dischargeable in bankruptcy. You don't even have to burn your savings to qualify for medical bankruptcy, just show how the medical debt is making cash in too close to your monthly cash out.
I knew a hospital where their financial aid would basically walk people struggling with payments through how to apply for a bankruptcy on thier medical debt because once the person completed the process, the hospital could write down the owed debt.
Or to provide the ultimate tl;dr:
If you put an extra $100 million into the medical system, you are mostly just going to see bonuses to executive salaries and not a lot of lives saved.
I would rather see that spent bringing home a person who volunteered to serve his country (and protect me) than to having Shaquieza or Rosa Gonazalopenunchechavez-asapergos get a 2nd dialysis appointment on the taxpayer dime every week when their only contribution to society was being the mother of 7, all of them dead or jailed.
