That’s the beauty of a federalist system. We can have up to 50 different answers at a time, and see what works best.
A jury of randomly chosen citizens who have to, by law, serve? The power to fine? From your description, not only it is a trial, it is a more expensive trial than we have today due to the jurors getting paid a lot more.
We got hit with this also. I agree.
The only colchicine studies to be taken seriously are the ones that did NOT get funded by drug companies looking for a monopoly, but those don’t meet FDA standards.
Physicians should be cautious when it comes to prescribing drugs, but when they do, they shouldn’t base it on company-funded research. There is no getting around that it takes decades to work out that risks and best uses of drugs. (This is the real lesson of the thalidomide tragedy, now that best uses have been worked out, with almost every country again allowing its sale.)
As for how this fits into Farin’s plan, the only way to avoid high-priced drugs is to either stop approving new ones, or chuck the need for an approval process.
By the way, I am a little unsure why it would be OK to outlaw expensive drugs while allowing expensive surgeries. Cancer research should be, and is, looking for drug-based alternatives to cutting off body parts. Such a disruptive technology shouldn’t be outlawed because the drug costs some substantial fraction of the surgery costs. Whether or not what is in my next link pans out, it illustrates why a firm drug price cap would be a mistake:
The US version of a trial is a tightly controlled method of justice where the randomly chosen pool of jurors decides which side is “right”.
This would be more akin to conscripting people to be police. As I said, anything deemed criminal would be turned over to the actual criminal justice system for prosecution.
I disagree. If the same drugs are significantly cheaper in other countries (and those other countries have an approval process, too, by the way), I would not attribute that higher cost to the fact that pharmaceutical companies need to prove their medicine works before a country allows doctors to prescribe it.
That being said, changing the drug approval process to be a better-functioning process I would not be opposed to, but is not in the scope of what I proposed.
I don’t understand why you think it would be outlawed. They just can’t charge people sixteen arms for prescriptions anymore. And expensive surgery, as I stated, would be free. The “cost” of them would be a derived number based on the equipment, personnel and etc used only to grade surgeons on their productivity and not to charge patients. Since this would be a “cost” and not a marked up price to gain cash money for the hospitals, the price you would see reflected would be significantly less than what you’d see now.
As for your link, it doesn’t mention costs at all, just that they are trying new methods. Do you think it’s okay that we make people bankrupt themselves on medicine only, much less procedures? As for Carl June, he works for an educational institution, not a pharmaceutical company. Odds are, once he shows it works, the pharm company will buy it from him and charge people $15,000 a treatment. This is complete crap, to me. Additionally, I think that saying that because someone perfects a new treatment they should get billions of dollars, to me, just isn’t compatible with any sort of affordable health care.
I don’t mandate to inhibit trials, or any other research. Just that the doses are cheaper than whatever the pharmaceutical company feels it can get away with.
Just looking at the base condition of that article, Leukemia, there are an estimated 48,000 new diagnoses of Leukemia in the US in 2013. If you develop a new treatment and charge 50% of those patients (not everyone jumps on the treatment bandwagon at once) $50 per 30 days - assuming that this particular method doesn’t cure them which it may, you are looking at $1,200,000 in the first month. Maybe it’s not enough to satisfy the growth that Pharm investors want, but it’s a good kickback. Especially considering that’s the number of NEW cases in a year. They will get 1.2M for that 24,000 block of people for the next seven years, plus any additional years they can get by bribing generics to not make generics.
Doctors are also saying that patients aren’t surviving leukemia because of the high costs of care are driving them away from treatment. If they go through treatment, their lives are over and they spend years in financial ruin. If they don’t go through treatment, their lives are over and they spend years in a casket. Which would you inflict on yourself?
So, in theory, a state could decide that everyone who smoked was required to pay into the state health system but was excluded from any care? And smokers wouldn’t even be able to obtain any alternative form of insurance?
And you could extend this to any other group of state residents as well?
I have come to the conclusion that the real problems are a) one of supply, and b) concentrated “economic growth” that leaves many citizens out of the benefits of inflation; and health insurance costs are derivative of these.
a) Having the government supply physicians by paying to train them (since the 1960’s as I understand it) is fine, iff the government actually maintains that supply. Since Gingrich and Clinton, it does not. So we are in a shortage due to the supplier’s indifference to the demands of the market.
b) We’ve been “fighting inflation” for the masses on the one hand, while accelerating it for the elite on the other. This is the real economic issue, and health care, being a professional service used by the lower classes, is where the effects erupt of disparity in enjoying the benefits of “growth.”
Fix those two things, and health insurance under whatever system might not be such a political nightmare, even if it’s structurally inefficient.
If you don’t fix the supply issue, no insurance system will be enough to solve the problem.
If you don’t fix the income growth disparity, but you increase the supply, at least prices may go down; but health care for the masses may still end up as something only funded by “charity” or “welfare.”
If you don’t fix either, health care for the masses can easily become, “a cost we can’t pay.”
Fiddling with insurance is missing the root cause of health care unaffordability, and the real problem.
That said, public insurance is in theory more efficient than private. I’m for the efficiency of public hospitals in theory. But I know that trying to trust a political class with a strong Reaganite bent to manage state responsibilities is asking to be defrauded and betrayed.
I’m afraid that the best “clean slate” for the USA is to get the government completely out of supply, by ending all state-funded residency programs. This will shrink, rather than grow, the number of new members of the medical profession, while those that remain will carry much greater debt, and over the intermediate term (~60 years) deny many or most Americans any affordable health care at all. But it would protect what little medical profession remained from “budget-cutting” politicians.
The other alternative, which is of course so absurd that I expect to be laughed at, is to just go ahead and build additional teaching hospitals, train more physicians, maybe also build public hospitals, but never ever again vote for pennywise politicians who try to cut useful services to look useful.
In theory, yes.