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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nicholas Thompson who wrote (79316)	9/14/2006 7:58:42 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

Many other countries are effectively subsidized by the US for their prescription drug purchases. The majority of the profit is in the US since we don't control prices. That profit motivates new drug research. We could effectively drop this subsidy and otherwise lower costs by limiting drug pricing but than you will get much less drug research. Other reasons for health care being more expensive in the US is that most other countries ration care to a greater extent. The truly rich can get tons of expensive care almost anywhere (even if their country mandates the use of the state system they leave the country unless it also prohibits such action) but that goes further down the ladder in the US than under socialized health care systems. None of which means I think the US has a good system. I just don't think that political allocation of resources is likely to result in a cheaper or better system. (In fact to the extent its already happened in the US its probably made our system worse). We aren't going to make medical school a lot cheaper if we put in place something like Medicare for everyone. We're unlikely to get doctors to accept much lower compensation (they do get lower compensation in most other countries), we aren't going to get someone else to subsidize our drug market so either we accept less drug development or the high prices that we have.