That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

Of course not. And I don't blame my father in law for taking the money either. Why wouldn't he?

I understand your confusion. I was not clear.

I don't think it is personally shameful for my father in law to accept the money. I think it is shameful that we, as a society, have allowed a system to function where he is offered that kind of money. You can cite 'market forces' as the reason that state of affairs exist but the truth is that the market doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is shaped by regulations, standards and bureaucracy put in place by intention or by accident by human beings. No place is that more true than healthcare.

Whether it is doctors that own a hospital or surgical center that, on paper, operate at razor thin margins while paying their principal shareholders, who happen to be employees, exorbitant amounts of money or urine testing companies charging thousands of dollars for a single drug screening while giving kickbacks to doctors in the form of leasing office space in their clinics for far more than market rates for their representatives, or medical supply companies that charge more for refilling oxygen tanks than the tanks themselves cost new and filled then we have some inefficiencies that could use the light of day below the surface.

None of these things are crippling in and of themselves. All of them together are creating a crisis that affects almost every person in the United States.

While we can afford to maintain* 11 individuals in the world. There reaches a point where over that entire population, we need to triage the medical issues in that population into the people whose issues maximize human-hours-lived given the X*Y healthcare dollars available to spend treating those issues. Maybe it's not the first person that requires treatment costing a million dollars we need to triage, but you eventually will run out of money if you don't triage because we simply don't pay unlimited premiums to meet the unlimited demand for healthcare.

The issue about overpopulation is a red herring, and in this case isn't just of function of helping people live longer. Many countries once they reach a level of prosperity stop having children at the necessary replacement rate of 2.1 children per couple once that society becomes affluent. The dropping replacement rate often correlates with societies ability to spend more money on helping their population live longer through spending on medical treatment.

There is no reason to expect the expectation of preemies to be above average, never mind 14%, never mind standard deviations. And there is substantial empirical evidence which I linked you to expect it to be far below average. Rescuing a preemie, even if it were free, would be a bad idea compared to alternatives like simply trying again.

> Even if the child winds up providing 50% of the value of an average person, it can still be a net gain.

And we're right back to your original problem: you are not thinking on the margin. The alternative to spending millions on premature babies is not no babies ever. (And even if it was, there's still superior alternatives: for example, lobbying for Open Borders. Think of all the millions of immigrants who'd love to come to the USA, for free! We wouldn't even have to pay them! Why, even if they're 99% below average, it's still a gain!)

> The stats you cite are for extreme cases on the edge of viability and the odds still slightly favor normal or near-normal development.

Which is what we are discussing, is it not? Or do even slightly premature babies come with million-dollar pricetags...?

> That's horrible reasoning. The human body has evolved over millions of years for birth. It is the optimal gestation machine. We're working on approximating this optimal machine with artificial machines

I'm not seeing any disagreement here. Yes, the human body is the optimal gestation machine. That's why premature babies come with all the penalties. (And note that those citations are just the penalties sufficient to be documented with small samples; there's not much reason to expect the penalty to abruptly cut off somewhere, it's just the long-term effects shrink enough to be hidden by noise and methodological problems and researcher careers' limits.)

> That starts at birth.

An arbitrary line is not a good basis for a system of ethics and governance.

> What you're proposing is barbaric and borderline infantcide.

I'm happy to own to that. It is infanticide. Premature fetuses are not humans in the moral sense: they have no hopes, they have no dreams, they have no desires or preferences, they do not think, and they have the moral status of a puppy or kitten. Given the disabilities they come with, throwing away hundreds of thousands of dollars in heroic medical measures is a crime against society and the person the parents could have raised instead.

I do not see how the logic follows there.

That it's reported in the news or published on his blog or written in a memoir or whatever is not the relevant fact here. The relevant fact is that it is something that he carefully planned to say and said, and that is sufficient information to have high confidence that it is what he meant to say and therefore what he thinks.