If we can play god? Should we?

[Ephiral]

Death isn't the worst thing that can happen. It's a choice between living a life full of pain (or living on painkillers) and dying. Of course, as long as you're allowed to keep someone alive, you're compelled to by ethics and culture, even if death is an end to suffering. I know it's a horrible thing to say. But when I'm old, I wouldn't want to be living with chronic pain, lying down 80% of the time, forced to eat bland food, taking day-long trips to the hospital.

Again, the solution to this is more "playing god", not less: We need to support voluntary end-of-life measures, not force an involuntary end that many would not find acceptable.

It's common knowledge. E.g. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/a-world-of-rising-health-care-costs/ "Crippling" might be a little dramatic, but nobody can deny that they're a significant cost.

Not just "a little dramatic", but "completely unsupported by your source". America in particular is a poor example, since it's insanely wasteful, and you'll note what the article says happened when the economy couldn't support continued growth: It stopped growing. This isn't killing economies, and isn't projected to, by what you've presented. Rather, it grows when economies grow, and doesn't when they don't.

Compare Cuban healthcare expenditure to American healthcare. America spends significantly more, and yet their life expectancy is only slightly higher. I would dig up the data for you if you asked nicely, but you seem to be argumentative, so would probably be a waste of time. But when looking at statistics, note that life expectancy does not tell the whole story. Accidents and violent crime reduce life expectancy greatly. A country with not enough money to spend on health will likely not spend on infrastructure or crime prevention, and those are the things which reduce quality of life and life expectancy.

A single case is not the whole picture, particularly when the nations in question aren't particularly comparable. Take a look at the US vs, say, most of Europe. Or Canada. Or other wealthy industrialized nations. Or look at other nations of about Cuba's wealth level that don't make medicine freely and widely available, as compared to Cuba.

No such thing as sufficient testing. Tests on rats are better than nothing, but not sufficient. You'd have to test it on humans (like early adopters), and test it over a long period of time for long term effects. I'm actually fine eating the stuff, but there should be an option for people not to, so that the human race doesn't die out in case it turns us into zombies or whatever.

The problem is that, once again, this is not an option and has not been since before we discovered genes. Every single thing we eat is genetically modified; it's simply that some of it is done the old-fashioned slow way with unpredictable and often undesirable results, vs the modern faster more predictable way that generally gets us at least some of what we want.

[JadeArwen]

Yes, why should we not?

I can't think of any good argument for ever halting human development.

Yes and I agree with Meikle