Super Care: the best possibly care

When your body has been severely damaged, and it has become impossible to take care of yourself, you want the best posible care & care-tools to survive as well as posible. Currently, world-wide, most people cannot get enouth care and care-tools. Care is expensive mainly because people are expensive. And people are not as efficiënt as machines. Care does not produce a product that can be sold; it is a necessary service that is often too costly for individuals.

So, will your care be perfect if you're super rich? Money can certainly get you better care, but it can't solve everything. Doctors and nurses are people who can help you. With more money, you can get more attention from them, but giving them ten times the money does not make them ten times better. They are still people with limits. Nor can money instantly improve medical knowledge.

Most people think minimum care is normal, but minimum doesn't have to be the norm. As a society, we can choose any level of care as the baseline. I advocate for optimal-care instead of the common minimum-care standard. Optimal-care is often better and cheaper overall. Providing better care can make people healthier, resulting in less expensive care being needed and less suffering.

When you're injured, you want to receive the best possible care. But in this world, you're already lucky if you can get (or pay for) a minimum level of care. The truth is that most people don't care much about others, except for close family and friends. They wish the ones in need the best, but they don't want to pay the bills or do the caregiving for free. In a well-organized, fairly wealthy society, everyone is forced to pay taxes and health insurance to make basic care possible for everybody. In most other countries, you'd better be very rich, otherwise you'll suffer more and die sooner.

There are people who provide excellent care, and I am very thankful for them! That said, people are also the biggest problem in caregiving, simply because of human limitations. I totally understand these limitations, couldn't do better myself. Plus, in this world of money, human labor is expensive. Being healthy and young is soo valuable. Only after losing a part your health for ever, do you truly realize how amazing it was, while you probably took it for granted.

Next level CARE

Needing no care because you are healthy is super, thus the best solution to physical damage is a 100% biological repair, getting your body parts equal to the original design. Doctors can sometimes roughly fix a part, and help the body to repair itself. Our bodies are biological and build up from a molecular level. We people mainly use machine-technology. Biology is like a million times more advanced than our current bio-technology capabilities, so we cannot truly repair our bodies, not yet. In theory, it may become possible one day, not after a lot of time but after a lot of research and development.

Although it will be strange and scary at first, receiving care from robots seems to become a real thing. They can improve care significantly by providing support for human caregivers, being ready to help at all times, and being cost-effective. But there are no humanoid care-robots yet. First, the AI-brain must reach a useful and safe level. This will happen soon after the technological singularity in (likely) 2026. At the same time, high quality robots need to be produced at high volume for an avordable price. Think Tesla.

Biological repair and care robots have yet to arrive. One thing we can do right now to improve the level of care, is to simpy give it more priority. If we want to have better care for all, we have to do the extra work, or/and spend less on other things. The other one thing we can do right now, within the current financial limits, is: smart-care. This approach is more holistic, focusing on quality and prevention. I call it “Optimal Care”. Better quality, more prevention, and can in total be less expensive than the current norm: minimum/basic care.

Note: This topic is very much from my point of view. I am almost completely paralyzed due to a very high spinal cord injury (C3/4) caused by a traffic accident in December 1995 at age 26. Since then I have needed an enormous amount of care, day and night. My brain still works, and I want to do stuff. Therefore, maintaining "control" over my care and life is very important to me.