In arguments for universal healthcare, the speaker usually points towards something like human dignity. Which is important, and you should also care about it. (Read Kant's Ethics, or some other moral system, if you don't know why.) But alas, cynicism is eating the world, so I speak the words of money.

When a human is born, they are stupid. Most babies can't even speak properly; they just start screaming, and you have to guess what they need. But as they age, they start to learn. Through a technology called society, they are educated on languages, on tools, and on how to reproduce the technology called society. At some point, they will be so smart that they can become a productive member of society, and they will start labouring. However, as time goes on, damages accumulate, and at some point, they die. Which is sad, because you can't extract meaningful work from a corpse.

Let's calculate times. In the good old days, a 10-year-old could work, either in the fields or in a coal mine. Also, in the good old days, most people died before 30. Nowadays, youngsters have to learn alphabets and calculus, and the education takes around 20 years. However, life expectancies have lengthened, and a 60-year lifespan is reachable.

If we look at that, we find that while working years doubled, education time also doubled, so the education-to-work ratio remained the same. But let's not forget that education is a multiplier. If you can read and write, you can collaborate with others even at a distance. If you know how to calculate, you can plan your production, and efficiency goes up. Twenty years of work nowadays produces much more than twenty years of work in ancient times.

Well, at least if an average human lives to be 60. With a shorter lifespan, the exploration-exploitation leans towards the second part. While an uneducated worker is less efficient, the societal level of production maximises at a lower point of education. Being uneducated is not stupid; it's an optimal individual strategy for a harsher environment.

But the human mind has the power to tame its environment. While individuals are weak individually, together they can form institutions and organisations to extend the expected lifespan. Higher levels of education can lead to higher efficiency. It can lead to a higher level of production. Previous luxuries can become commodities, or leisure time can increase. However, given the strongly connected nature of the modern economy, it can only work if the individual strategies align for more education. Healthcare is not just an insurance for individuals, but for society as a whole.

And it kind of happened in the 20th century. A common meme is that if we send a smartphone 100 years back, the people will be shocked. But it's not just physical artefacts; send back a common person to talk about how to organise group chats, advances in route planning, some basic (nowadays basic) concepts about stock markets, and the shock will be similar. Improvements in mental machinery are not as visible, but have the same importance. And these can only be built through education, which will only be chosen with higher expected health.

Finally, I criticise the Ars longa, vita brevis by Scott Alexander. The fictional premise is that there is a fixed maximal lifespan of 70 years. The alchemists work towards the philosopher's stone, which would expand their lifespan. However, the work is so terrible that even though they study their whole life, they can research only for a few minutes before dying. Therefore, they cannot spare a minute to help a sick child. The moral of the story is to work on the Big Thing for the future.

The story shows the connection between lifespan and attainable level of technology. Even with improvements in education, there seems to be a ceiling for what technology can be researched in a fixed time. But a big difference between the story and reality is that the human lifespan has a much greater variance. Also, the research is very linear. The guild of alchemists has to build up a Great Researcher, so they may move forward a bit. But in real life, research is broader and happens in collaboration.

Not just in the sense that research teams instead of single researchers, but even across fields. Improvements in computing technology lead to better medical imaging. Improvements in chemistry and physics lead to higher electricity generation. More power means higher efficiency of food production. Higher standard of living means longer lifespans, which leads to more research. Deaging therapy (closest realisable thing to the stone) might be the work of a single researcher, but they will stand on the shoulders of advanced societal production chains.

So while the fictional world may have bizarre laws, in real life, the alchemists should have given out the medicine.