Some 1970s-era medical treatments simply aren't purchasable, either, either due to practical/economies-of-scale reasons or due to changes in the world.
Anything that requires technology/manufacturing has a sort of cliff, where you can use the current technology (or perhaps one generation back), or you can use very primitive treatments, but not much in between. You could dig through the history of technological advances for some particular device, and make the rational decision that Generation 3 of the device is the optimal one for you on the price/benefit curve. But if we're on Generation 9 currently, you simply can't use Generation 3 machines, sorry, because nobody makes them and no hospital/doctor still uses them, and the FDA might not even allow their use anymore; you use a recent one, or none at all.
Some drugs have a not-really-available effect as well. I might actually be happy with penicillin as my antibiotic of choice... if it had 1970s levels of efficacy. Unfortunately, resistance to penicillin has greatly increased, so "1970s penicillin that works like it was the 1970s" just isn't a product you can buy anymore.
Somewhat of interest to me, because if it were possible to buy 1970s-era health insurance that worked like it was the 1970s, I might actually do it, with a few a-la-carte exceptions. I've read some of the literature that tries to quantify the effect of new medical technology on health outcomes, and the single biggest one for adults appears to be better vaccinations, so I'd definitely still get a modern vaccination schedule. A second worthwhile one is improved surgery techniques, especially arthroscopic surgeries that reduce the need for traditional open-wound surgeries, and thus also reduce many infection/etc. complications.
But a lot of the increase in expense is stuff I would be willing to opt out of if it were an option: 1) huge increase in heroic last-6-months care; and 2) chronic-condition drugs like Viagra, SSRIs, Ritalin, statins, beta blockers, etc. Not that those have no arguable benefits, but if I had the choice to purchase a health-insurance plan that excluded those categories, that would fit my cost/benefit analysis.
Anything that requires technology/manufacturing has a sort of cliff, where you can use the current technology (or perhaps one generation back), or you can use very primitive treatments, but not much in between. You could dig through the history of technological advances for some particular device, and make the rational decision that Generation 3 of the device is the optimal one for you on the price/benefit curve. But if we're on Generation 9 currently, you simply can't use Generation 3 machines, sorry, because nobody makes them and no hospital/doctor still uses them, and the FDA might not even allow their use anymore; you use a recent one, or none at all.
Some drugs have a not-really-available effect as well. I might actually be happy with penicillin as my antibiotic of choice... if it had 1970s levels of efficacy. Unfortunately, resistance to penicillin has greatly increased, so "1970s penicillin that works like it was the 1970s" just isn't a product you can buy anymore.
Somewhat of interest to me, because if it were possible to buy 1970s-era health insurance that worked like it was the 1970s, I might actually do it, with a few a-la-carte exceptions. I've read some of the literature that tries to quantify the effect of new medical technology on health outcomes, and the single biggest one for adults appears to be better vaccinations, so I'd definitely still get a modern vaccination schedule. A second worthwhile one is improved surgery techniques, especially arthroscopic surgeries that reduce the need for traditional open-wound surgeries, and thus also reduce many infection/etc. complications.
But a lot of the increase in expense is stuff I would be willing to opt out of if it were an option: 1) huge increase in heroic last-6-months care; and 2) chronic-condition drugs like Viagra, SSRIs, Ritalin, statins, beta blockers, etc. Not that those have no arguable benefits, but if I had the choice to purchase a health-insurance plan that excluded those categories, that would fit my cost/benefit analysis.