Re: Fixing America's Health Care Crisis

On Sep 23, 10:10 pm, Rick Blaine <d...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Right. It's called socialized medicine. The Canadian government is dictating the
price they will pay drug companies. That works fine as long as the market is big
enough to provide some marginal income for the drug companies and someone else
is willing to shoulder the costs for developing new drugs. It breaks down when
the country paying the majority of the costs decides they can't afford it any
longer, which is what's happening with the US.

??? Free market or unfreemarket, in any system the seller and buyer
have to agree on a price. If the Canadian government decides it can't
afford to pay a hundred dollars for some erection drug, it offers $3.
Nothing's stopping the drug company from saying no. The Canadian
government can't compel an American or German or Swiss company to sell
them a drug at a loss. The drug companies continue to sell in Canada
because that's still making money, although not as much as if they
could get as much as they asked. For example, see how the drug
companies weren't selling AIDS drugs in Africa, since they weren't
making money selling those drugs at what those countries could pay,
until they got kind of shamed into it by PR.

In general, most companies or individuals would make more money if the
buyer would just pay whatever the seller asked; and quite often, that
would indeed lead to a higher quality of product, or more diverse
product, etc. However, for whatever reasons, the market does not work
that way, and buyer and seller settle on a price that each of them can
accept, or there is no sale. That's hard on the folks who do pay
whatever price the seller charges without bargaining, but the answer
to that is not to compel the folks who do bargain to stop that and
just pay whatever the seller charges. In that case, they would just
not buy the stuff at all.

Of course, this whole question of who pays for research ignores the
nature of companies like pharmaceuticals, or chip designers, etc.,
where fixed costs like research are huge, while the actual variable
costs (i.e. per pill) are tiny, so that assiging what portion of the
research cost is correct for each individual pill is just arbitrary.
See the ongoing debate over whether pharma research costs are actually
more or less than advertising costs. If you want to look at actual
costs, the first sample of a pill (or chip) produced costs
$1,000,000,000, and all samples after that
cost $1. Which brings us back to that reference I made above; if the
drug companies weren't making money in Canada, they wouldn't sell
there.

The simple answer would be to explicitly fund pharmaceutical research
by the government(s) as something that needs to be done for society,
but is a money loser for whoever gets stuck paying for it, rather than
bury it in the overall budget and try to parcel it out per pill, but
that would change the whole pharma biz greatly.



No individual in the US, legal or otherwise, can be denied emergency healthcare
in the US. That's the current law and has been for years.

right:

"People have access to healthcare in America. After all, you just go
to an emergency room."
- George W. Bush, July 2007

"Bush polyps benign
WASHINGTON, July 23 (UPI) -- White House spokesman Tony Snow Monday
said the five polyps removed during U.S. President George Bush's
weekend colonoscopy were benign.
....
"They represent the various -- very earliest cellular changes," Snow
said. "Left untreated, they can progress to larger, more advanced
lesions and a small percentage could become cancerous."
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_News/2007/07/23/bush_polyps_benign/2751/

Better for the patient, cheaper than treating the patient for cancer
later.

So, the only thing that I'm wondering is.... at which emergency rooms
can you get a colonoscopy so your precancerous polyps are removed,
saving you a bunch of grief and the "system" a ton of money?

This is a perfect example of what's wrong with the US healthcare
system. At an absolute minimum, there's 10% of the population who
cannot get a cheap and simple and low risk procedure with a big payoff
for them and the finances of the system; instead, they get told "come
back when you get cancer, we'll treat you for free then, and vast cost
to the system (i.e. everybody else) and a lot of misery and high risk
of death for you". How can this possibly NOT end up giving the stats
we see: higher death rate/lower life expectancy, and double the cost
of any other country? And this is just one example of many such. The
only possible advantage to anybody is that those who do have health
insurance or can afford to pay virtually unlimited sums for their
healthcare can feel superior to those who can't and don't. The price
for that is too damn high.

.

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