My brother has a clinic to perform outpaitent procedures because he gets $350 to perform the procedure and the hospital gets $4000 as a facility fee. When he does the procedure at a clinic, he still gets $350 but his clinic gets $1200 as a facility fee. The up side is that society has saved $2800. The down side is that the facility fee charged by hospitals was subsidizing other parts of the hospital.
We need to figure out some way to fix our system without making medicine financially unattractive. Beating up on doctors is not a very good way to fix health care considering that the average income of doctors has dropped significantly over the last few decades.
The Republicans will tell you that if pharmaceutical companies didn’t have a market like america, the rate of pharmaceutical innovation would be much slower.
True NIH is responsible for a lot of advances in medicine but we are the generator of a lot of the advances in the medical world.
Without a high end payer like the USA, these drugs would never get developed.
Which is fine but then they take those patents and ship them off to the Cayman’s so the patent royalty income is sheltered in the Cayman islands and they produce the drugs in some low regulation, low wage country so they can produce the drug super cheap and then sell it into the USA and make a lot of money while they sell the same drug into Canada for a fraction of what they charge us.
Most drugs are invented in college labs. The drug companies pretend they are doing the heavy lifting. they are not.
A successful drug is worth billions. You can cut back a long way from that and still have plenty of incentive, Apparently you believe people just work for money. Apparently nobody is trying to solve health problems as a challenge or an educational experiment . They are not trying to be the one who cures a disease. That is not a drive in your world?
There are plenty of drugs invented in private labs. Balco was doing all sorts of research of athletic performance drugs in a back alley lab. It was their field of expertise.
Another strawman. No one is making the argument you just attacked. The point to ensuring the benefits for current retirees or those about to retire is that they don’t have the time or ability to modify their own spending and savings to make up the difference - they’re locked into fixed incomes.
By instituting change now, but not having it affect people over 50, you’re sending notice to younger people that they need to start saving more for retirement or otherwise making plans knowing what will be available to them from the government in several decades.
The notion that the U.S. government should just force drug manufacturers to lower their prices is one of the most dangerous ideas in the health care debate.
Drug companies set their price at the market-clearing price. That price is going to be different for different countries because the wealth of nations is not uniform. But it is to everyone’s benefit to allow drug companies to set different prices per country.
Instead of thinking that Americans are being ripped off because other countries get the same drug cheaper, it might help to think that the American drug market is being subsidized by poor people in other countries. Two sides of the same coin.
The key issue is that drugs cost a fortune to develop, but pennies to manufacture. Also important to consider is that once a drug reaches the market, the clock is ticking on the patent and the drug manufacturer has to make all that R&D money back, plus the R&D money spent on drugs that never made it to market, plus make some profit before the patent expires and generics undercut the market.
So if a drug costs a billion dollars to get certified, and has a potential market of 100,000 Americans, that drug would have to earn $10,000 per user before the patent expires for it to be profitable. But if you can also sell the drug to Canadians, Argentinians, Cambodians, and everyone else, the per-unit cost of the drug can come down - even for Americans.
But if some idiot politicians manage to pass a rule that says the drug companies can’t sell the drug to anyone else for less than they sell it to Americans, all those other markets will vanish. And that means the drugs could well go UP in price for Americans, or not be developed at all because the market is too small to warrant the investment.
The high regulatory cost of drug certification is already driving drug manufacturers away from drugs that help small populations and towards drugs like Viagra or hair loss preventers that can be sold to wide swaths of the population. The last thing you want to do is shrink the potential market even further by making it impossible for drug manufacturers to sell to other countries without destroying the profit in the domestic market.
Sam - I do believe that this is the exact arguement or effectively the exact arguement. It would be crass to specificially call out “We are going to keep the retired voting block whole so you won’t vote against this plan.”
You’re sending notice to people under 50 that their taxes (via increased healthcare costs) are going up and that the top individual rates are not going up. What do you call r
raising the life costs on one segment and not increasing the taxes on another?