>>Why We Must Ration Health Care<<
John -
Interesting piece. Thanks for posting it.
I had a thought about healthcare costs just last week. It's about the idea that if you socialize healthcare, the profit is taken out of the system, and then the pharmaceutical companies and others have no motive to do research to produce new, life-saving drugs and therapies. It's an idea that seems to make sense, but I think there's a problem, which I will illustrate using the example of cancer. My recent experiences with cancer have left me with a fair amount of knowledge of how our healthcare system deals with it.
For several decades, companies in the US have done a tremendous amount of research into fighting cancer. They have come up with a great number of drugs and treatment methodologies, and the result is that more people survive cancer now than in the past. (More people get it, too, but let's deal with that later.)
The problem is that every single one of those cancer treatments is astonishingly expensive. Chemotherapy costs thousands of dollars per session. Anti-nausea drugs like Kytril are a hundred and fifty bucks per dose.
Why has all this research not produced any drugs that don't cost a fortune? I find it difficult to believe that it is impossible to find a way to treat cancer less expensively. I think that the reason such therapies haven't emerged is that the companies that do this kind of research have no motive to produce inexpensive treatments. When they can make ten grand for each infusion of Oxaliplatin, a platinum-based chemotherapy drug, why would they want to look into something that might cost fifty bucks a shot?
I think we need to motivate our most brilliant researchers to come up with effective treatments for our various ailments. But we should develop a system that rewards them more if those treatments are less costly. And I can't think of any way to achieve that without removing the profit from healthcare, for the most part, and having the government fund medical research.
I don't advocate a system that completely eliminates the possibility of privately or corporately funded research, nor one that restricts options for people who can afford more expensive treatments. But I don't see how we make healthcare cost less when it is a for-profit business.
- Allen
PS: Speaking of Oxaliplatin, which was a part of the "FOLFOX plus Avastin" regimen I was on last year, Wikipedia has some interesting things to say about it. Seems the efficacy of the drug hasn't really been established. Yet it's an established (and extremely expensive) part of the standard regime for colorectal cancer.
en.wikipedia.org |
