>> Insurance companies don't do R&D.
You really don't know what you're talking about here. Of course, insurance doesn't pay for experimental procedures. And they don't actually "do" R&D, but they DO pay for it. A LOT.
When Prozac hit the market in the late 80s it sold for $2/day, then, a very high price. Insurance companies paid for it, which the manufacturer used to offset its R&D cost. Today, generic flouxetine is 21c/day. That R&D was PAID FOR by insurance companies, any way you cut it. A few years ago I had to have a 21-day heart monitor at a cost of some $3,000. Nothing more than an EKG via cell phone, but it was new at the time. Who paid for that? Arkansas BCBS. This argument can be made about almost any drug or procedure or piece of medical equipment.
And not to get too far into the weeds on this, when you start killing the insurance companies you're killing the goose that laid the golden eggs which yield these technologies.
The most difficult concept for the Left to get -- you and Koan are representing it here, and I heard some leftwinger on the radio going on about it today, too -- is that every time you take a dollar of profits out of health care, you also take out some percentage of a dollar's worth of innovation. That is innovation that not only the US will not have, but neither will those single payer systems in other places. Paying for that innovation is the cost of world leadership.
Kill the waste, fraud and abuse -- 100s of billions a year. You know where it is? Medicare and Medicaid -- your "single payer" systems. Private insurance companies don't tolerate it. |
