And to pay for the adverts. All $2.8 billion worth of them. Because it’s important that you should be able to tell your doctor just what drug you reckon is the best for your erectile dysfunction, on the basis of a 30 second advert.
Yeah. The Big Pharma marketing budget is bigger than their R&D budget.
Plus you got the opiod makers paying some doctors tons of money for nothing to encourage them to prescribe their pills.
And a good chunk of their R&D doesn’t go to new medications to treat diseases that currently have no treatment, or treat a disease better than other drugs currently do, but rather to develop a drug that does what another drug already does, but is different enough to get a patent.
We always have TRILLIONS for wars built on lies. (Ignore the corporate welfare and focus on the 3 cents extra out of your paycheck for a single mom’s baby food)
The question of how things cost different amounts in different countries is a complex one, that is really beyond the scope of this discussion. Take a look at this bit of data:
I frequently cite this stat to illustrate the overlooked story of how much better things are getting for the global poor. But there’s something else to be gleaned here: how much cheaper many, many things (including Maslow basics like food, clothing, and shelter) obviously must be in many parts of the world. Try living on under two bucks a day in the U.S., even in a low cost of living area like rural Mississippi. Good luck!
Most of the people in this thread and who support AOC, Bernie, et al. At least that has been my impression. If there is an incrementalism in here, it is not being publicized. But go ahead: tell me how you plan to make it gradual.
If the employer, or the government, is contributing significantly to the HSA, that doesn’t really fly. Unless you would also say that people in France aren’t getting their care for “free” because they are paying for it in taxes?
Yes, it’s obscene and sickening. Not to mention the junkets they take doctors on, the swag “pharmaceutical reps” (a job which should not exist) ply them with, etc.
Indeed, this is a major problem. I would like to see all pharmaceutical research be taken over by the government, or better yet by a coalition of all the governments of the world.
But I wonder if some here could possibly find their way to looking at this ridiculously corrupt situation with Big Pharma and start to understand why anti-vaxxers are skeptical of vaccines for this very reason. Instead, they (and I was one of “they” when my older kids were small) are treated as the most incredibly gullible idiots imaginable.
I’m not really sure of the relevance of this to what’s under debate here. But Ben Goldacre put it most succinctly:
Do you really think that tone-policing the vaccination issue is appropriate when children’s lives are at stake? Your claim is bullshit anyway, I have never seen anyone treat parents asking genuine questions as “the most incredibly gullible idiots imaginable”. The people who get short shrift are the ignorant JAQing morons peddling their antivax conspiracy theories, not the people genuinely seeking advice and information.
It is not appropriate to mislead parents by acting as though there is a genuine controversy on the issue when there’s not. When antivaxxers have as much evidence on their side as conspiracy theorists who claim that we didn’t land on the moon, their claims should be treated with the contempt they deserve. The rule is: if you don’t want your ideas treated with contempt, find some better ideas.
No, I don’t understand it - because pharma companies make less than 2% of their revenues from vaccines* and could make a fuck of a lot more money instead selling drugs to reduce the damage to people who contracted these diseases.
You’d have to be a complete fucking idiot (Hello, you) to look at companies who are clearly interested in making a profit, and conclude that they’d enable such a conspiracy, to the detriment of their own bottom line, when they could easily destroy it by just a single person out of the hundreds of thousands involved leaking any decent bit of evidence about the secret mind control drugs, etc, etc.
*https://www.skepticalraptor.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Vaccine-Market-Value.pdf
You should be careful about pulling out that irrelevant little factoid. You’ll pull it out like it’s some startling revelation in a conversation where people are comparing costs in the US to costs in Canada*, Australia**, Switzerland***, France**** Germany*****, Norway (!)****** etc., and people will look at you like you’re a fucking idiot.
You should save it for when it actually might be relevant for the point you’re trying to make, like when people are comparing costs in the US to costs in Malaysia.
- 24% higher costs than the US
** 12% higher costs than the US
*** 63% higher costs than the US
**** 12% higher costs than the US
***** 13% higher costs than the US
****** 80% (!) higher costs than the US
All above based on the Economist Big Mac index 
The argument that “Sanders, AOC, etc didn’t overtly say they wanted gradual implementation, therefore they must want it implemented abruptly” is no more sound than “they didn’t say they wanted sudden implementation, therefore they must want it implemented gradually”. Sure, in these discussions people are comparing the current US system with other systems on a “if we could wave a magic wand” basis but no one believes that an actual transition to UHC would be simple. Right now everyone is still working on the “what”; the “how” will follow.
I will, however, note that both the ACA approach and the experiment in Vermont were small steps in the direction of UHC, which suggest that a gradual approach is more likely to be the approach if ever it happens.
The problem is that a lot of the excess costs of healthcare in the US is due to the number of different systems and actors. It generates a massive bureaucracy. I remember a study concluding that the yearly cost of billing in the US system was just short of 500 billion $. Higher pay in the healthcare sector is pretty small-fry in terms of increased costs.
That was the problem Vermont faced: Adding yet another layer and actor to the system doesn’t realize any of the savings UHC normally entails. If you had allowed the state to use Medicare, Medicaid etc funds to set up a system the cost calculation would have looked very different and far more affordable.
[my bold]
The principal lesson from this digression is, of course, the precedent that SlackerInc was capable of ignoring overwhelming evidence to reach stupid and harmful conclusions. I wonder if that’s relevant to the current debate?
I’m going to put the vaccine digression into a spoiler box:
Whoaaa…talk about a strawman! I have never even heard of this “secret mind control” stuff. What I saw was a landscape where Big Pharma, like any other giant corporate entity, was under enormous shareholder pressure to constantly grow (the “ideology of the cancer cell”, as the saying goes) and were snaking their tentacles through vaccine standard-setting boards just as they have done elsewhere with all their junkets and pharmaceutical reps. Just coincidentally, these boards were significantly increasing the number of recommended/required vaccines. So I saw them pushing unnecessary drugs, with undesirable side effects, in every direction they could (surely you don’t deny that) and what better place to do something similar than in “vaccine schedules” that essentially make them a mandatory purchase for the entire population? (Saying they are “only two percent” of the pharmaceutical industry is silly, when Viagra is only one-tenth of one percent, and no one can seriously say that’s unimportant to Pfizer’s bottom line.)
I mean, did you know that eating certain “superfoods”, or even just getting a little midday sun, reduces blood pressure as well as medication or better? You won’t hear that from Big Pharma, I assure you.
In point of fact, I did change my mind and began fully vaccinating both my children (then 3 and 5) in 2005 after seeing the “overwhelming evidence”. But most of those studies had not yet been published in 2000 when my eldest child was born.
(As it happens, the two children I subsequently had in the past decade who got the full vaccine schedule starting at birth both have autism, while the older two do not; that does not change my mind about the evidence, which really woud have to be part of some vast conspiracy far beyond the ability of Big Pharma to effect.)
You may not, and good for you. But a lot of people have not researched this much at all, and are willing to accept the “wave a magic wand” rhetoric at face value from someone they admire like AOC. So she ought to stop doing that, and so should the people in this thread and those like them across the country.
Are you saying they should have set up a state equivalent of Britain’s NHS?
First of all, that is the exception rather than the rule even among UHC countries.
It does seem to work well for the UK, and certainly in theory is the best way to streamline everything and keep administrative costs down.
BUT it strikes me as essentially impossible to imagine that something like this could be created in the U.S., due to political and economic hurdles. And if it somehow overcame those, I don’t believe most people would culturally adjust well to it, no matter how well it worked statistically speaking.
I mean, have you been to a VA hospital? That’s the American equivalent. When my eldest was born, I had to go through the tunnel from the regular hospital to the VA hospital to get film for my camera (quaint, I know) for some reason. The hospital he was born in had works of art everywhere, flowers, an airy lobby, etc. On the other side of the tunnel, it was like someone was making a movie about a Stalinist gulag. It wasn’t technically dirty (although the paint job was chipped and faded), and everything looked functional enough, but to call it “drab” would be an incredible understatement.
But is she doing that? Because it looks to me like you’re building…what’s the word? Oh yes…a strawman here.
At this point in the conversation it’s all about aspirations and broad policies and goals. I keep seeing people extrapolating from AOC saying “We should have UHC and here are some basic ideas on how it might be funded” to “AOC hasn’t given us any detail therefore she doesn’t know what she’s talking about” while pointedly ignoring that we’re not remotely at the fine detail stage. (Actually, mostly what I see from AOC opponents is “OMG SOCIALISM!!! VENEZUELA!!!” but fortunately such arguments are rare and short-lived on this messageboard.)
Its one option. Beveridge-type systems seems to be the most effective in terms of healthcare per dollar in developed nations.
I am curious about the numbers behind that assertion?
I think your impression of the US capability to accomplish stuff is pretty low. Much lower than most peoples. A health care system that covers everyone is something everyone else in the developed world has managed to set up, and a number of nations not generally considered part of the developed world. I don’t really think the US get-stuff-done ability is that much worse than every other peer nation.
I mean for one thing if your starting assumption is that the US are fundamentally incapable of stuff everyone else does as a matter of course, it gets hard to have a response to anything. Its not a paradigm you can base any actions on.
“Drab” does not actually reduce outcomes in any measurable way. I also think it is far preferable having only the emergency room for a health response. Some of them are pretty drab too.
Please provide a quote or two that you choose to interpret that way.
Now there’s the Can Do spirit that made America great. :rolleyes:
A hospital that accepts Medicare would be a better equivalent. Since, well, we’re discussing expanding eligibility for Medicare, nothing more.
Elvis, pay closer attention. Grim Render sparked a subtopic discussion of nationalizing all parts of the entire medical system as the UK has. The analogue to that in the U.S. is definitely the VA.
Pressed for time ATM. Will respond to some other points/questions later.
Is this what you think hospitals in London or Berlin look like?
It does not seem so much like “waving a wand” rhetoric as gang rape rhetoric (cite). That’s more difficult to admire.
Regards,
Shodan
Bravo, you found something inappropriate spoken by a 29 year old freshman representative. Gee whiz, if only a Republican would say something inappropriate, I could take you down with a BSAB, but alas, you guys never say anything racist, or sexist, or anything, you’re pure as the driven snow.
And that was a strawman hijack. Can we get back to real proposals, please?