There are significant costs involved in hiring. If people are being drafted to work at hospitals, those hospitals no longer have to spend money advertising positions or time interviewing candidates.
And since WW2 civilians as well. In the UK, an Emergency Medical Service was set up to cope with both military and civilian war casualties at home; and one of the factors driving early thinking on what a national health service would look like was that by the end of the war (i.e., in a very few years), the eligibility rules for treatment under the EMS were taking up a 68-page booklet.
That’s why governments fund specialist expert bodies to assess and support research proposals, with money and assistance to find charitable and commercial sponsors as well. Or is that not how your universities and National Institutes of Health work?
Actually, if you adjust for population the most prolific producer of new drugs is the UK. With its notoriously cheap NHS system.
Cite: US Pharmaceutical Innovation in an International Context - PMC
Wrong, although of course you weaseled it with a “might”. That’s just university research. Which you’d know if you’d read the caption on the figure you linked to. There aren’t even that many other words to read. Try again.
This looks at cost only in terms of money. Forcing people to spend two years in an awful job working for free is a huge cost even though it is not monetary.
Well that blows a few well practiced arguments out of the water:
I’ve never really understood this spending/innovation argument. GSK can develop a drug in the UK or in the US. Where they develop it and the price in that market vs the other shouldn’t have much to do with each other.
There’s not much point in looking for reasoned arguments from the healthcare lobby.
They perpetuated the biggest, most successful con trick in the history of democracy on the American people for 50 years by basing their strategy on wrapping profiteering in the flag (socialist/unamerican healthcare, etc)- it’s no surprise they used the flag again to promote price-gorging US pharma.
Depends on the relative size of the markets in question, but also on the supplier’s perception of what the market will bear. If you want the NHS to prescribe your drug, you know their cost-benefit methodology and the maximum price they will pay. You also know that that market’s that much smaller than the US or anywhere else without a similar set of controls (and that getting it accepted centrally by the NHS reduces your marketing costs) - so you make a judgment as to how best to maximise revenue across all markets.
Sure, if medical care was free, everyone would want to be sick just for the fun of it.
It’ll be just like the way people abuse free police service by going out to be crime victims.
That matters where you market your drug and with whom you seek regulatory approval. But you don’t have to develop a drug in the US to sell it here.
Trying to take profit out of the equation isn’t the right solution.
The right solution, is to arrange it so that the profits result from actually making people healthy in a way that they will want to be. That’s why for-profit works with everything else that goes okay.
The problem with health, is that the most profits come from gaming the system such as gaining control of the only drugs that can help, and then running the price up, or telling people they need more services at higher cost than they actually need. And that’s all made worse, by adding layers of bureaucracy and artificial propping up of costs (i.e. the “insurance” model).
Well, what happens in practice is you have a finite budget - a national budget, if you will - and an awful lot of genuine healthcare professionals invested in making the system work.
What then happens is a miracle; over time, you get more and more and more value for the same amount of money as those invested staff find more and more efficiencies and are able to help more people better. After all, healthcare is a genuine vocation for these people.
You then add to that a private sector that understands the system is interested in anything that garners efficiency, and that there is huge money for them in efficiency, and the two work together.
Which produces still greater and greater efficiencies. Eventually you can end up with a system that costs about half that of the USA system, and which covers 100% of the population.
Sometimes. Sometimes not. But you’ll note that you included the word “Commercial” in you list - Which means the profit motive is back.
+1
and what could be more inefficient than letting Health “Insurance” executives earn MILLIONS of dollars by denying care to sick people?
Have you seen other countries’ postal services?
The USPS is amazing. I can put a letter in a box in my own home and 3 days later it can be 2700 miles away - to an address that barely has roads. For only 46 cents. Saying that medical care could work that well for everyone - not a bad thing.
I think the hospitals themselves operate pretty efficiently. Nurses I believe earn what they are paid and work hard for the money they get. The only real problem is we have a situation just asking for extorsion when they are holding your life at stake. Too many unneccessary hospitalizations, too many $5,000 dollar MrI’s, too many specialist visits at over $1,000 for 15 min. And then you can start on drugs. Profit medical is not working and I am a conservative.
This does not follow, you will die a lot quicker from lack of housing or food then healthcare but that does not mean the housing companies or grocery stores can charge whatever they want. Removing the profit from medicine would not improve things.