Logical Reasoning

PT6 · S2 · Q6 High-technology medicine is driving

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High-technology medicine is driving up the nation’s health care costs.

Passage

Causal (driving up) High-technology medicine >> higher nation's health care costs

Illustrative Example (improved cataract surgery)

new tech for >> surg less painful, >> more ppl >> more costs cataract surg more effective, have surg & cheaper

Evaluate

The passage starts with a general causal claim and then zooms in on cataract surgery as an illustrative example, presenting a causal chain that gets us from high tech medicine to higher health care costs.

Goal

Must Be True questions commonly deal with conditional chains and typically reward us for seeing two things that are indirectly connected.

We'd probably guess that with a causal chain, they'll do something similar (e.g. .)

6.

Which one of the following can be inferred from the passage?

  1. Ten years ago, few people

    Unsupported

    We know that number of cataract surgeries has "increased greatly", but that doesn't allow us to say that previously there were few people who got the surgery. Given that we know it's a major cause of blindness in elderly people, it's very possible that many people still got the surgery.

    5% picked this

  2. In the long run, the

    Out of Scope

    The passage does include an advantage of advanced medical tech (cataract surgery is cheaper, less painful, and more effective) as well as a disadvantage (overall health care costs are higher). But we don't have any way to weigh the good vs. the bad, nor do we know the full scope of all the advantages or disadvantages.

    4% picked this

  3. Correct

    The total amount spent on

    Why this is right

    This is a mathy inference that's embedded in the relationship between "The number of cataract operations has increased greatly / the operation is less expensive / the total amount spent on cataract surgery has gone up". Each operation is cheaper, but there are more operations. That could result is us spending less money than before, the same, or more. Since we're told we are spending more than before, we know that increased cost (of doing more operations) outweighed the savings (of each operation being cheaper). For total spending to rise while each operation costs less, the growth in the number of operations must outweigh the drop in cost per operation.

    Skill tested: Must be True · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

    82% picked this

  4. Huge increases in the nation’s

    Too Strong

    Cataract surgery is offered as one illustration of how technology raises costs. The passage does not claim that surgery for older people is the primary driver of national health care costs, and one example cannot establish what is "primarily" responsible for a nationwide trend. This trap answer is the familiar style we see on Must Be True / Must Be Assumed where they try to make us think that the Only Thing Mentioned is therefore the only thing / the most important thing / the primary thing.

    4% picked this

  5. Ten years ago, cataract surgery

    Contradicted

    The passage says the new technology made the operation "less expensive." So, if anything, we'd assume that ten years ago the surgery was affordable for fewer people than it is now.

    5% picked this

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