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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dybdahl who wrote (18442)	7/22/2010 2:00:57 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

To my knowledge, there are no pharmacy cures to cancer, migraine, epilepsy, AIDS, diabetes and many others. I'm sure that some diabetes types can be cured with a pill or a simple surgery, I know that some types of epilepsy can be cured with non-epilepsy drugs, but the financial motivation to find out is very low, sometimes nonexistent in a ROI-based consumer-payer health market. This is a very cynical view and I'm not sure the data supports the claim. There have been long-term treatments for cancer for years but AFAIK nobody has stopped looking for "the cure". If someone finds a "cure" for most any cancer, there is a ready market. Some cancers (e.g., bile duct cancer) have such small markets that there may not be much drive to solve the problem, but there isn't much to treat it long-term, either. That's a problem with many diseases, however. AIDS has been treatable for a long time, but there is still a substantial effort to find a cure, is there not? And probably the most important "cure" of them all, antibiotics, are designed for short-term use to kill an infection, hopefully never to return.

To: dybdahl who wrote (18442)	7/23/2010 8:58:58 AM
From: skinowski	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

if you look at the pharmacy industry, they have much more interesmt to sell drugs that keep you alive, than drugs that cure you ... And having said that, you go on to acknowledge, correctly, that for many diseases pharmacological "cures" do not exist. So, what are we supposed to do? Refuse treatment because absolute cures are not being offered? Dunno.... To me, a medication like a Statin, which is the product of literally centuries of cumulative hard work and scientific progress, is almost like a miracle. It is less imposing than a half mile long ship or a 100 story building, but the amount of sophistication it takes to make it is.... comparable. Or, take Insulin. We take it almost for granted, and we like to find shortcomings with it - but it keeps millions of people living their lives, instead of being dead and buried. This everyday medication is an incredible product made possible through genetic engineering.