On Sunday, April 1, 2018 at 9:56:13 AM UTC-6, Quadibloc wrote:

On Sunday, April 1, 2018 at 5:54:34 AM UTC-6, Gary Harnagel wrote:

One of the problems may be that we as US citizens expect more in healthcare
than the country can afford.

Well, naturally.

....

Part of the problem, though, is that right now new drugs, for example, are
researched by private enterprise. And so they have to recoup their costs by
charging more than the marginal cost of production of those drugs.

Had the research and development been funded by the taxpayer *in the first
place*, there would be no need to demand high prices of the sick, as the
research would already have been paid for.

John, TANSTAAFL: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch (or more
grammatically, TINSTAAFL).

Many potential drugs don't pan out, but you have to wade through many, many
possibilities to find the jewels. That costs MONEY. It doesn't matter
where the money comes from, it MUST be spent. And do you REALLY believe
gov't bureaucrats would spend the money as wisely as corporations? And
do you REALLY believe gov't leaders would allocate sufficient funds to do
all the necessary work? The present system actually works because drug
treatments are subsidized by the gov't.

And surely it's as important to cure every disease as it was to build the
atomic bomb, so how can one object?

The bomb project was a crash program and very wasteful, but it had a time
limit. Diseases are almost infinite and new ones show up all the time.
That may seem comparable to further bomb research, but it's much, much
more expensive.

Take a look at ALL the biotech companies in the stock markets. They lose
money every year yet investors keep pouring more money into them hoping to
strike it rich. Most go broke, but who do you think pays for that? It's
not the gov't.

If the money came from taxpayer's pockets in the first place, rather than
from private companies whose stockholders could then be pillaged by new
legislation, perhaps the country might confront how much it is willing to
pay for health care? Socialism is less bad when the voters are taxing their
own pockets than when they are robbing someone else and thus destroying
incentive.

John Savard

The money ALWAYS comes from the taxpayers in the present setup as well as
ANY alternative, except the "just let them die" option. I believe private
enterprise is generally more efficient than government.