Comment by ModernMech
21 days ago
Trivial is what we have now. Taking fluoride from the water means people will have to spend extra time and money on fluoride and dental treatments. When I viewed it, your comment appeared directly after this one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43524171), which talks about a town in Canada that voted to abandon fluoride , saw worse health outcomes, and then voted to reinstate it. This tells us that fluoride is not trivially available to people, and taking it away from them enriches corporations while making people less healthy.
So you’re saying that forcing a treatment on people that don’t want it, is a fair price to pay to reduce inconvenience for others?
I’m not sure what your anecdote proves because I’m wholly in support of a polity being able to make that decision.
I was responding to this point:
I also agree that people should be able to make decisions like this, but they should be aware that one of the results of these kinds of efforts could be that everyone gets less healthy, rather than everyone stays at the same level of health with less cost.
Presumably when they voted to get rid of fluoride in the water in Calgary, they didn't do so expecting the outcome would be that people in their town would be less healthy overall. Nonetheless, that was the outcome of their vote.
The anecdote shows that it's not trivial, because when the fluoride in the water went away, people were not able to trivially replace it, leading to worse health outcomes. Ultimately people found too high of a cost, seeing as that they reversed the decision.
Sadly it took a decade for them to realize their mistake. I worry people today are making the same mistake, and we will reverse it in a decade after health outcomes are shown to have worsened.