substandard wages. We will have to compete with the medical community to find another Jerry Leaf. I don't think we will ever find another person with his skills who will be as charitable. It will take money to get other kinds of expertise. We will need support personnel from the medical community, people who will not be as dedicated as our present staff. It will take money to hire this needed help. However, as we grow, we will be able to charge a little more on each suspension and we can recover these expenses if we have the will. Charging for your labor and full overhead is a hard concept for some people (especially those without a business background) to accept. It seems greedy to some. I am not advocating overcharging people, but we ---------------------------------------------------------------------(15)
must begin to recover our FULL costs including overhead or we will not be able to buy the things we need to do the job right. We cannot run Alcor by buying liquid nitrogen alone. The everyday overhead far exceeds the small costs of liquid nitrogen and dewars. In 1989, we spent $193K for overhead and only $8,715.96 for liquid nitrogen. There is no universal figure that any two persons at Alcor will agree on as our exact cost for each part of the total cryonic suspension and storage program. And, no one knows what reanimation will cost. However, I have watched over the expenses for a short while and my best estimate at the figures is as follows: Cost to prepare & perfuse a patient: body). Minimum amount needed for storage:
$20,000 (Neuro), $22,000 (Whole
$20,000 (Neuro), $60,000 (Whole body).
Minimum amount needed to reimburse overhead: (Whole body). Total needed:
$35,000 (Neuro), $35,000
$75,000 (Neuro), $117,000 (Whole body).
Our cost ratio of neuro to whole body is not one-third; charge one-third as much when we do one?
why should we
Of course, this is only my best estimate at this time. Because of the nature of cryonics, and the fact that some of our labor cost is volunteer, some labor is paid below scale, and because of all the uncertainties involved in doing cryonics, it is hard to come up with anything more than an estimate and the cost changes from month to month. However I feel that the above figures are a good average. Some members argue that legal expenses are not for the benefit of the patients in suspension. I disagree. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in protecting Dora Kent and Dick Jones after they were in suspension. We spent a hundred thousand plus dollars fighting the Health Department on their assertion that cryonics was illegal and to prevent actions that might have lead to the defrosting of our patients. Our legal victory is protection for our patients. There has even been one person who tried to convince me that the legal expenses, and other overhead, should be charged more against whole body patients because they are bigger. (I am not making this up.)