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Politics : A US National Health Care System?

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To: Road Walker who wrote (3450)	12/24/2007 11:36:04 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) of 42652

It addressed all of that except the point about marketing, which I addressed in a different post. It would vastly reduce the cost of marketing/advertising. They would still need to market. Even if the government pays for the drug the doctor and the patient are the people who decide to get the drug just like now, they would both be marketed to just like now. I'll address the issues one more time. Then I suppose you can pretend I didn't answer them one more time. and shows that the margins are out of the ballpark. It shows nothing of the sort. Marketing is a cost, its direct effect is to reduce margins. Of course the idea is to increase demand and thus increase margins even more, but spending a lot on marketing doesn't show high margins let alone out of the ballpark margins. That's true whether or not the margins are high (or even "out of the ballpark"). Because of government subsidizes of basic research. Yes they subsidize basic research but they don't pay for all of it. And more importantly they don't to any great degree subsidize the large cost of developing, testing and approving drugs once they get past the basic research phase. This cost is often much larger than the basic research cost. Force down costs with national market monopsony buyers and there won't be much incentive to meet this huge cost, unless you get much larger subsidies from government. The outlier is the US, which chooses not to participate in the efficient marketplace. National monopsony buyers aren't examples of efficient markets. They are lucky enough to avoid much of the problems normally caused by effective price ceilings by having the R&D largely paid for by US customers who pay well above such ceilings. If the US imposes the same than there is no other large group or rich consumers to fund the development.

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