Obamacare hits home ~
No, capitalism does not work very well to drive better technology in medicine.
If you are managing a pharmaceutical company and you have a billion dollars to invest in research, do you invest in:
A. Tying to find a quick and permanent cure which might never make back in profit the billion you spent, or
B. Spend that money on developing a new drug you can sell the victims of this disease for the rest of their lives, and make back several billion per year in profits
If you answered A, your company would fire you for mismanagement, and rightly so. Good capitalism is bad medicine, and good medicine is bad capitalism.
Capitalism is based on profit, which is heavily dependent on ROI (return on investment.) Cures for diseases are not very profitable. The huge profit margins are in selling you drugs to keep you alive and slightly more comfortable for several decades.
European countries which switched to socialized medicine have been passing up the US in developing more effective and economical treatments for diseases, especially rarer diseases for which the profit margin makes spending research money a bad investment. I know of couples who had to go to France to get children with rare diseases treated because treatments for those diseases are not available in the US.
If you are managing a pharmaceutical company and you have a billion dollars to invest in research, do you invest in:
A. Tying to find a quick and permanent cure which might never make back in profit the billion you spent, or
B. Spend that money on developing a new drug you can sell the victims of this disease for the rest of their lives, and make back several billion per year in profits
If you answered A, your company would fire you for mismanagement, and rightly so. Good capitalism is bad medicine, and good medicine is bad capitalism.
Capitalism is based on profit, which is heavily dependent on ROI (return on investment.) Cures for diseases are not very profitable. The huge profit margins are in selling you drugs to keep you alive and slightly more comfortable for several decades.
European countries which switched to socialized medicine have been passing up the US in developing more effective and economical treatments for diseases, especially rarer diseases for which the profit margin makes spending research money a bad investment. I know of couples who had to go to France to get children with rare diseases treated because treatments for those diseases are not available in the US.
Those treatments were not available in the US because of the FDA, not because of lack of technology.
We have a friend who works for a major pharma company who is being moved to China, because this pharma company is being regulated and taxed to death here. Our friend is going to run the R & D for this company in China because they can no longer afford to do it here.
We have a friend who works for a major pharma company who is being moved to China, because this pharma company is being regulated and taxed to death here. Our friend is going to run the R & D for this company in China because they can no longer afford to do it here.
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You ignored my basic point.
Good capitalism is bad medicine, because a cured patient is a lost customer. This is basic common sense.
This is why the US currently ranks 37th among nations in quality of health care, and continues to fall. It has nothing to do with the FDA.
Every industrialized country on the planet has some form of national health care. In how many of those countries are the citizens demanding to go back to privatized medicine?
Answer: None of them.
Don't fall for corporate-sponsored hype of "all our problems are caused because the government won't let us just do whatever we want!" Those regulations are there to protect people from the pitfalls of capitalism, which is rampant greed to the point of disregard for human life.
When it came out that the Ford Pint's doors would jam shut and it would often explode when suffering a moderate collision from the rear, Ford executives saw that it would cost less to fight the lawsuits of the family members of the people who got roasted alive than to issue a recall (they already had the attorneys working for them) so they chose not to do the recall. This is typical of large corporations. You don't get to be a global megacorp by being more concerned with your customers' health and well-being than your profits.
Good capitalism is bad medicine, because a cured patient is a lost customer. This is basic common sense.
This is why the US currently ranks 37th among nations in quality of health care, and continues to fall. It has nothing to do with the FDA.
Every industrialized country on the planet has some form of national health care. In how many of those countries are the citizens demanding to go back to privatized medicine?
Answer: None of them.
Don't fall for corporate-sponsored hype of "all our problems are caused because the government won't let us just do whatever we want!" Those regulations are there to protect people from the pitfalls of capitalism, which is rampant greed to the point of disregard for human life.
When it came out that the Ford Pint's doors would jam shut and it would often explode when suffering a moderate collision from the rear, Ford executives saw that it would cost less to fight the lawsuits of the family members of the people who got roasted alive than to issue a recall (they already had the attorneys working for them) so they chose not to do the recall. This is typical of large corporations. You don't get to be a global megacorp by being more concerned with your customers' health and well-being than your profits.
Wrong about the pharmaceutical companies. That's such a bromide about there never being a cure for this or that because the company makes so much money treating it. Youd don't think they'd charge for this cure?? You don't think that they'd capitalize on their success BIG TIME?
Historically, there are a lot of diseases that used to wipe out huge portions of the population or disable them. Cured. Or vaccines developed to fend them off. Why would this not continue? I was involved in the colinical trial for shingles vaccine. There's quite a bit of money to be made in antivirals and pain meds (pain meds are dead cheap to make). Yet I was one of hundreds and hundreds of nurses, enrolling thousands and thousands of study participants. Do you think that companies used to be more socially conscious than they are now? I doubt that corporate greed is much worse now than ever. It was many decades ago that they enacted laws against sweat shops and child labor and things like that.
And the final thing is - I've worked in both basic research and clinical trials. I was a nurse and all the investigators I worked with closely are physicians and nurses. Do you think there is enough money or red tape in the world to shut us up if we had ANY inclination that something that was effective was being squelched? Not bloody likely. My license and my career were on the line from the time the idea was first proposed by who-ever had the bright idea to when I wrote up a proposal for my institutions review board to when the monitors come and watch how we do it.
There was a cancer drug that was going through clinical trials back when I was still working. I don't remember the specifics because I've lost my best brain cells to anemia etc., but the clinical trial was scheduled to go on for 2 years. The results were so overwhelmingly positive that the study was shut down. It wasn't ethically right to carry on testing and giving some people the old treatment when the new one was so obviously actually working.
I haven't formulated a really good concept of the new insurance programs. I do know that the cost to us is much much higher - they even changed the copays for medications in the middle of the year which is unheard of. I also know that the insurance as we know it and have it now is not available next year, but is being replaced by something more expensive and which requires not only copays but deductibles as well. I know that the Tennessee attempt at state run Medicade has caused the General hospital and the university hospital and a Catholic hospital that all used to provide a lot of free hospital and clinical care have had to shut down/combine clinics and are no longer providing such free care.
I personally think that health care should never be a for-profit concern and I'm leaning toward saying that I think health insurance should also not be for-profit.
Dennie
Historically, there are a lot of diseases that used to wipe out huge portions of the population or disable them. Cured. Or vaccines developed to fend them off. Why would this not continue? I was involved in the colinical trial for shingles vaccine. There's quite a bit of money to be made in antivirals and pain meds (pain meds are dead cheap to make). Yet I was one of hundreds and hundreds of nurses, enrolling thousands and thousands of study participants. Do you think that companies used to be more socially conscious than they are now? I doubt that corporate greed is much worse now than ever. It was many decades ago that they enacted laws against sweat shops and child labor and things like that.
And the final thing is - I've worked in both basic research and clinical trials. I was a nurse and all the investigators I worked with closely are physicians and nurses. Do you think there is enough money or red tape in the world to shut us up if we had ANY inclination that something that was effective was being squelched? Not bloody likely. My license and my career were on the line from the time the idea was first proposed by who-ever had the bright idea to when I wrote up a proposal for my institutions review board to when the monitors come and watch how we do it.
There was a cancer drug that was going through clinical trials back when I was still working. I don't remember the specifics because I've lost my best brain cells to anemia etc., but the clinical trial was scheduled to go on for 2 years. The results were so overwhelmingly positive that the study was shut down. It wasn't ethically right to carry on testing and giving some people the old treatment when the new one was so obviously actually working.
I haven't formulated a really good concept of the new insurance programs. I do know that the cost to us is much much higher - they even changed the copays for medications in the middle of the year which is unheard of. I also know that the insurance as we know it and have it now is not available next year, but is being replaced by something more expensive and which requires not only copays but deductibles as well. I know that the Tennessee attempt at state run Medicade has caused the General hospital and the university hospital and a Catholic hospital that all used to provide a lot of free hospital and clinical care have had to shut down/combine clinics and are no longer providing such free care.
I personally think that health care should never be a for-profit concern and I'm leaning toward saying that I think health insurance should also not be for-profit.
Dennie
"It's so beautifully arranged on the plate - you know someone's fingers have been all over it. ~Julia Child"
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