Single Payer nightmare in hell complete with death panels

The Aussie system is not bad . Ours is a dual system public/private and because most basic care especially of high risk patients is covered by Medicare then really we are paying much much much less for private care.

About the only difference from a patient viewpoint is that you can get wine with your meal in a private hospital

 

As I said America is NOT the only one developing drug therapies

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-06/revolutionary-australian-cancer-drug-given-us-approval/7819344

 

1)Lifetime cap limits could be exhausted at any point within a person's life should they be unfortunate enough to contract a rare disease.Even premature babies in NICU routinely top over a million dollars in a very short time. So no on the cap limits.

2)While I am for doctor assisted suicide, I don't think we are there yet in unraveling all the ethical and legal matters involved....and neither are doctors.

3) This is the most practical, but politically it's hard to sell. In general, it is seniors who fall into this category, and the greatest risk is on those who have a parent or grandparent in a nursing home. In many cases, because of the changing makeup of the American family, these patients have little family support and basically just leave their relative to whatever Medicare will pay. There has been recent legislative changes which allows CMS to take a more pro-active role in end of life matters. See:http://www.kff.org/medicare/fact-sheet/10-faqs-medicares-role-in-end-of-life-care/

 

Absolutely, the Pacific Rim has stepped up to the plate in a big way. I think we're just barely covering half of world R&D at this point. Barely half is a lot.

The US is still the world leader, and by a large margin.

Here's my view on the subject: Our healthcare is really expensive, and that's a good thing on the whole. Given that fact, raise taxes and cover everybody.

The right-wingers are right, there are significant advantages to our system. So let's mix our advantages with the advantages of other systems.

EDIT: Want to be clear that I'm not lumping you in "our." I know you're Australian.

 

So if you take into account R&D they are actually losing for every bottle they sell overseas? Then why sell overseas to begin with?

 

They've already sunk the R&D costs and the American market covers that.

They sell overseas because production and distribution are very, very cheap.

 

Not quite, you pay for R&D of future drugs with the proceeds from past drugs and it isn't like they are only using dollars from American drugs for R&D its all lumped together and they just divide it among their expenses.

 

5 Reasons Prescription Drug Prices Are So High in the U.S.
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Excerpts:

The “most important factor” that drives prescription drug prices higher in the United States than anywhere else in the world is the existence of government-protected “monopoly” rights for drug manufacturers, researchers at Harvard Medical School report today.​

AND​

Most of the time, scientific research that leads to new drugs is funded by the National Institutes of Health via federal grants. If not, it’s often funded by venture capital. For example, sofosbuvir, a drug that treats hepatitis C, was acquired by Gilead after the original research occurred in academic labs.​

 

The only way to do that is to tackle the health care industry directly. That is where the expenses are coming from, when they charge you $20 for an aspirin in the hospital. Placing people in a health insurance mandate is doing nothing but putting a bandage on the actual problem. I'm sure that there are some rules that could be put in place that insurance companies would have to follow (like REGULATIONS).

 

I'm not opposed to reforming the insurance and healthcare industries. I just don't want the government running them. They suck at pretty much everything and corrupt pretty much everything. They have the opposite of the Midas touch, that is for sure.

 

Only some universal care countries have the government running the healthcare itself which is called the Beveridge Model where healthcare is provided by the government like a public utility. It exists in the UK, Scandinavia, Spain, Hong Kong, and Cuba. In the rest it is either single payer or almost-universal health insurance. Countries with either universal healthcare spending tend to pay about half or less than what the US pays for healthcare and even spend less on public care than we pay for the fraction who are covered by the government. Yet Americans don't have twice as good healthcare. As you can see the free market can mess up too.

 

Ok, what specifically would you do?

 

Who do you think runs the single payer universal health care? Who do you think pays for it?

 

Three is the most likely given our disfunctional government. I would question the assumption thst is the most practical since it does nothing to solve thenproblem.

 

Good chart. A free market only works where there is competition which does not and cannot exist in the healthcare arena.

 

The doctors and nurses aren't going to work for free. The drugs don't pay for themselves. Nothing is really "free." Someone somewhere is paying for these things, and it is most likely the taxpayers. I don't have a problem with this if a person is elderly or needs help, whatever the case may be. However, being a country of over 320 million, you NEED to have a healthy balance of people working and contributing to the system and people collecting services or else you will go belly up!

Obama did sneak this in by calling it a "tax," and making it mandatory that everyone buy health insurance, but this is unconstitutional for our government to force a citizen to buy something just for being. If it is what is considered a "privilege" like driving a car, then you can be forced to buy car insurance before you drive, but driving is not a constitutional right by any means (at least by the FEDERAL government, this could definitely be debatable when it comes to the individual states though).

I do wonder if the liberals understand that? The government has limits for some very good reasons. That is why we are still a free country today. It is important to not allow the government to sneak things by us, claiming it is one thing when it is CLEARLY something else.

 

Well if you could eliminate the five percent profit margin just thst alone would be significant. And in actuality the gain would be gross profit not profit after taxes so the savings would be much larger.

 

It depends on the system used. In single payer healthcare is run privately but the government pays for it from taxes paid by people with a national health insurance and regulates healthcare like we do but in a way that cuts costs. In the Bismark Model healthcare is privately run and paid for in most cases but again we have government regulations, its like a cost effective version of Obamacare. In the Beveridge Model it is run and paid for by the government like a public utility. I don't see any conclusive data showing that one type of system is better than the other but what is found is that all of them are far more cost effective than the US.

 

Not really true. Some of the biggest supporters of the Republican plan to deprive millions of Americans of their healthcare are the old people on Medicare. And of course You wre correct that they vehemently oppose any attempts to broaden healthcare since that won't help them and might increase their taxes.

 

Well the United States has a very high employment rate and has one of the largest economies in the world so providing universal care should be a lot easier here assuming we can get the same low prices as in other places.

Nobody is forcing you to buy insurance, its only that you pay a tax or fine if you don't. The idea here is that in order to ensure that pre-existing conditions are covered and that the insurance pool will include young healthy people you need mandate. The idea here is to mandate insurance but also make sure that people are helped to pay for their insurance. Countries like Australia, Japan, Netherlands, and Switzerland already have an insurance mandate and it works out pretty well for them.

I think this is a case where the free market has failed to be affordable and the government regulations have not helped and we need to overhaul our system and find a smarter cost-effective system with good regulations.

 

You have to face the very real fact that when it comes to issues of death and dying, we as a culture are very reluctant to address it. Remember the knee jerk reaction propagated by Sarah Palin about "death panels"? Many people to this day believe Obamacare has such a thing, but they don't. It requires educating the public, and that will take time.

 

Because all of the cost of the drugs are up front in research, clinical trials, regulatory, etc. Billions can be spent over decades to develop and test a drug. Production cost is minimal, so pharmaceuticals can sell drugs overseas and not lose money. They offset some of their costs, but not enough to recoup the capital expenditures before generics can come in and takeover.

 

The idea that having the government in control of healthcare decisions is a good thing? That's just scary.

Nope. The decision just moves from insurance companies to the government. Neither situation is what we want...

 

The cost of the drug is upfront, but that cost is paid through the sales of previous drugs. Those other drugs are also being sold to Europeans hence why they are also paying for R&D.

Something to take into account. Only about 20% of their expenses are R&D, after all costs like R&D, and wages are paid for they have a 20% profit margin which is ludicrously high. And as you said production costs are low and a lot of the rest are going to their employees and execs who get crazy high salaries. You are acting like they are struggling, they are killing it.

 

This may be a bit cynical but thinking you can actually educate the public to deal with the really tough moral issues has been proven repeatedly to be impossible.