New Yorkers: Prepare to welcome your rich, deathless overlords

The medical field is one of those things that is basically alchemy to us, given all the experience we have with it and our utter lack of contact with it  due to being uninsured/young and unbreakable. That’s why we’re glad Gina Bellafante at the Times let us know what’s happening in the exciting field of medicine in New York. Except what’s happening there is that doctors aren’t taking insurance and setting themselves up as doctor concierges (docierges?) to people who are willing to pay $25,000 per year for the privilege. And the service comes with all sorts of life-extending extras, so basically our billionaire oligarch class will never die.

Bellafante talked to Dr. Edward Goldberg, who got sick of lower reimbursement rates for doing routine medical procedures, to the point where he said it affected how he ran his practice. So, he ditched the idea of taking insurance altogether and started making people pay for their treatment completely out of pocket. This, apparently, is a good thing, to rich people, who don’t trust doctors who agree to take insurance.

So Goldberg is joining a few other doctors across the country in taking this attitude to its logical extreme, and starting a practice where patients can pay $25,000 for unfettered access to treatment on-demand, wherever you are, by Goldberg or his partner Daniel Yadegar. The service will be exclusive, limited to 400 patients at most. Is anyone interested? “A few internet moguls.”

Not only will the doctors travel to wherever you are to listen to your hypochondriac complaints, they’ll also be using the newest and most cutting edge sci-fi gadgets available (to you, not the poors) to screen for things like cancer, help you avoid toxins, keep you looking youthful with quickie plastic surgery options.

And while Bellafante worries that this could create “a science-fiction metropolis in which only the best-off remain, living the longest and healthiest lives, never looking a day older than Mary-Kate Olsen,” we welcome this potential dystopian future. If rich suckers want to pay us to harvest our organs like we’re so many sacks of meat, we say go ahead! Who would want to live forever? Especially with the end of every day being 24 hours closer to the ocean taking its final revenge on us and reclaiming the Earth as its own. Tell you what, anonymous tech moguls: I’ll start living a more healthy life in exchange for you taking care of my gym fees and a one time payment of $500,000. Then when I’m 35, you can take my heart and liver and other useful organs, so that you may live and do the Great Things that need to be done. The ocean wins every time anyway.

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