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

To: Eric who wrote (24111)	7/11/2012 7:41:03 PM
From: i-node	4 Recommendations Respond to of 42652

>> You think just about everything is invented here? Where is your proof?? Not everything, but well over half the major medical innovations in the last 50 years have come from the United States. And even when the invention didn't, it was often American capital markets that made it possible (e.g., the CT scan). There is plenty of "evidence" out there, but here is a good paper on the subject: cato.org >> Why do we pay so much more for drugs here (two to three times) as other countries?? There are two factors which combine to make our drug costs higher than in many other countries. First, and most important, is a fundamental premise of microeconomics, which is that you always want to operate at the point where marginal cost is equal to marginal revenue (since this happens to be the local minimum and maximum for these respective curves). Secondly, the fact that drug costs are price-controlled in many other countries means that we pay for the development cost. Essentially, if a drug manufacturer can flood the market with Pill#1 such that there is so much on the market that each incremental Pill#1 sold precisely covers the marginal cost of manufacturing it, they will do so because that maximizes their profits. In effect, any contract negotiated with a price controlled country must generate sufficient revenue to cover variable manufacturing costs plus a little in order for it to be profitable for the manufacturer. OTOH, we aren't price controlled, so we end up paying the big up front costs of the original innovation -- perhaps 2 billion over the life of the patent. If we pay less, either some country has to pay more (maybe your friends in Germany & Sweden), or more likely (since they're price controlled) there will just be less innovation because the high development costs of new drugs can't be recovered in the US. This is the price the US pays for having the most innovative health care system in the world; and we always have. The rest of the western world is doing just fine without us for one half to one third the cost we pay here. Only because we are paying for the innovation and have been all these decades. The worst thing that can happen to other western nation's health care system is for the United States to adopt their ways of doing things. Being 37th in the world for healthcare here is nothing to brag about.. Many third world countries take better care of their citizens better than we do! Geez, we aren't 37th in the world for healthcare. You're citing the old WHO report which has been discredited time and again by competent analysts. You may just want to good that. It has been pointed out that the report placed undue weight on government intervention and used life expectancy unadjusted for non-medical factors, for a start. But there are TONS of other problems with the WHO report. The most damning criticisms have suggested that the WHO reports was designed with the specific intent of making US performance relative to other countries look worse than it really is. In effect, the conclusions from the report are worthless, although if you look carefully at the data there are some gems to be found. I think the reason you are so uniformed about this may be that you jump to the liberal point of view without actually looking at the underlying facts. Not unlike your positions on energy, I suspect.

To: Eric who wrote (24111)	7/11/2012 7:45:08 PM
From: TimF	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

You think just about everything is invented here? He didn't say everything was invented in the US, and that idea is irrelevant to the point. First of all its not an issue of everything, just pharmaceuticals (and probably medical devices as well). Secondly its not an issue of where things are invented, but of where the money comes from to pay for the research that develops the innovation. The fact that the US government makes much less of an effort to control drug prices means the US market provides a disproportionate amount of the dollars for newly developed drugs, even if those drugs are developed outside the US. This would be an even larger factor if it wasn't for the long and costly approval process required by the FDA. Being 37th in the world for healthcare here is nothing to brag about. Its also an unsupported, even silly, claim. (And also irrelevant to the above point, even if the US really was 37th it would still be providing the lions share of revenue to support new drug development) One clear problem with WHOs methodology is that it gives major weight to "health care equality", note this is not the same as measuring the level of care for the worst off and giving it more weight, if that was what you measure then improvements for the better off wouldn't hurt that measure, its measuring the difference, and considering a big difference to be bad. If you ranked quality of health care from 1 (the worst) to 10 (the best), then a country with 1 for the poor and 2 for the rich, would score much better on this measure than a country with 2 for the poor, and 10 for the rich, even though both get better care in the 2nd country. More at agoraphilia.blogspot.com agoraphilia.blogspot.com agoraphilia.blogspot.com econlog.econlib.org realclearpolitics.com nejm.org Message 25661057 Message 24680723 Message 24358529 Message 26443468 Message 26441390 Message 26442897