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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (64315)	4/3/2018 3:04:23 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Recommended By i-node Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 364453

And its not just heavily weighing access (which arguably could make some sense) but in some cases weighing "equality" as equal to measures of quality. If healthcare got better for the rich, while staying exactly the same for the non-rich* than that score would go down. when you consider the overwhelming majority of all the world's health care innovation at that time was either done in the US or at least financed by US companies. Or at least with the profit possibilities from selling to American consumers being a major part of the incentive to fund the development, testing, and ramp up of the health care innovation. The US was almost half the world's economy at the end of WWII (with much of Eurasia in shambles, and much of the world less developed), and its still about a fifth. And that fifth has more than one fifth of the ability to spend on medical care*. It also is far less prone to price controls or to have or use government monopsony buying power to drive down drug or treatment prices (here not just less than poor countries but also less than a number or wealthy countries). Say some spectacular, but incredibly expensive new treatment for a very common condition which generally wasn't covered by insurance or by government programs or by charity (which might cover hyper-expensive treatment in rarer cases, but probably not to the extent that it would become a common treatment). **More than one fifth of the surplus spending power. Take enough of the poorer countries in the world to equal the gross production of the US. Sure that grouping has the same production, but it has a lot more people. More of their purchasing power will go to food, to housing, to clothing, to meet the most basic infrastructure needs etc. Even when you only consider what they have left to spend on health care, more of it will go to basic cheap treatments not new innovations. Also poor countries are more likely to insist on lower prices or to just steal the IP for drugs.