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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (263228)	5/1/2008 3:27:57 PM
From: Ruffian	Respond to of 281500

<I said that the normal human condition is for the big to get bigger. > Companies do not get big if they are normal................

To: geode00 who wrote (263228)	5/1/2008 4:44:23 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Look at the history of Walmart and how they got to where they are today. Yes. By defeating their competition, and then they continue to be where they are today, by remaining highly competitive. You continued to define your original position more narrowly when it was clear that your original position was simply not true. Its clear the original position is true. Also its not something I've moved away from. I still support my original statement, I just expanded on it. In general it is very difficult to cancel large government programs. I will take rationing based on wait times or copayments over rationing based on suffering and death any time. Rationing based on co-payments that are sufficently large to be effective, is just another form of rationing based on price. Rationing medical care based on wait times does cause suffering and death. And in the long run removing profit from an activity, reduces the investment and innovation in that activity. In the case of health care you get more suffering and death, because of this fact. I can't predict the future but I have provided ample evidence of how other industrialized nations do a better job than we do You provided claims that they do a better job, but not provided anything that really backs up these claims. And even you could establish that the results where better in other countries, by some standard or collection of standards that we agree on, that doesn't show that the reason for the better results is their health care payment systems, or that importing their system or something like it and applying it here would improve our results. Actually, Reid's experience (shown on the Frontline piece I linked) showed that this was not true. If your going to say "this was not true", in a post with multiple points, that responds to a post with multiple points, you should quote what you think is not true, or include the supposedly false idea in the sentence. He was looking at scans (MRIs I think) which the Japanese government said were simply too expensive. They wouldn't pay and so Toshiba came up with really inexpensive scanners to meet its 'markets' requirement for cost. What does that show as being not true? That in many other countries patients don't have to wait longer for scans than in the US? No it doesn't show that is not true. That people and companies don't invest less in new technology, techniques, materials, etc. if you reduce or eliminate the profit from the activity? No, sorry one example of one company producing one new type of item doesn't in any way show that isn't true. The result is a new product line for them that they can sell overseas at greatly reduced costs BECAUSE their market (the government) said they could do better. If the government gave them the idea, that doesn't mean its mostly BECAUSE the government said they could do better. The fact that they can undercut their competitors, and make a profit selling the item is the real benefit to them, and the real incentive for the investment. Profit hasn't been taken from them. Now imagine a repeat of the scenario, but with no posibility of major profits in overseas markets, with greater costs for R&D and testing, and with higher risks that the investment won't produce any salable item at all. This would resemble the drug industry if you sharply limited the ability of the industry to make high profits on certain drugs. Now you would be unlikely to get such investment, and if you did it wouldn't be the normal default, but an extraordinary one off do to charitable impulses or political pressure. If drug companies want to remain in business, they will spend more on R&D than they do on slick advertising and marketing direct to consumers. They do. A large part of their recorded "marketing" expenses is free samples, which actually cost very little to produce, but which can get written down for more than the cost of production. Also these samples help consumers, even if advertising was somehow all waste (and it definitely isn't) this would be a benefit. Then you have to consider the cost to develop a drug includes the testing required to get it approved. Factor all that in and the idea that more is spent on advertising than drug development is not only wrong, but massively and obviously wrong. But even if it was correct, it wouldn't be very relevant to your argument. If R&D and testing was say 10% of the cost of marketing, it would still be a significant investment, and one that would only be routinely made if the risk adjust rate of return on that investment was competitive. Since many drugs do not pan out, the risk on any specific development project is high. The cost is also high. And since few drugs turn out to be blockbuster successes, you need very large profits on these successes if you are going to continue to get strong investment in new drugs. How in the world do individual consumers negotiate drug prices? They don't negotiate (or at least they rarely do) they change the demand equation by buying alternatives, even if the alternative isn't quite as good, when the best drug costs a lot more. The negotiation is from the competing insurance companies. If there was single payer, it would be more price setting than negotiation, but since there are multiple insurance companies its is more of a negotiation.