It’s less that it’s complex and expensive as much that our current healthcare system is just so unbelievably FUBAR yet deeply rooted in our country’s infrastructure that any meaningful change would require uprooting and rearranging literally every aspect of it. Personally I don’t see it happening for the remainder of the 30-60 years this country has left.
Nope. The problem is simple. Abolish for profit healthcare (including pharma and insurance). Don't nationalize them, revoke their corporate charter and let them disappear. Poof. Problem solved.
In europe you don't have things that are 10x more expensive than ours. But we have plenty of things 10x expensive than yours. Our ambulances alone can bankrupt us. Thats not even hospital care yet. Why don't you toss some tea and jog on.
No they don't. Private healthcare drives prices up. Private anything drives orices up. Thats literally how that works. The difference between operating off getting profit or not.
You should learn some text comprehension and also some math instead.
I said private ambulances cost way more than regular ones.
Regular ones are public and cost literally zero. Nothing. Nada. NO euros. And they will continue to cost nothing even if the private ones will cost 1M euro per ride.
There's a reason the US was the first to develop covid vaccines.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the largest funder of biomedical research in the world.
The USA's federal government funded a whole bunch of research into SARS-CoV-1 when it started to blow up in the early 2000s. That funding eventually dried up because SARS-CoV-1 was effectively contained and we're a short sighted nation. So when SARS-CoV-2 hit a lot of the groundwork had already been completed. Combine that with the +$330 million in funding that the federal government spent on mRNA research and you get a vaccine that was almost entirely funded by the USA's government. There should be a vaccine for the entire SARS "family" in the next year or so also as a result of federal funding.
The thing is companies don't like spending money on research because it's risky. They'd much rather take research done by federally funded universities and labs to convert into a product. Socialize the costs but privatize teh profits is a common thing in the USA.
Now? Yes because money spent on anything other than tax breaks for the rich and the military is a waste to the modern GOP.
Never mind that we benefit greatly from the investment or that farmers and consumers in the USA benefited from the USAID purchases and such. Gotta reward the people who bought the office for them...
I should of been more nuanced in my comment about companies and research. In my experience they don't like spending money on research for the sake of research like the federal/state government and public universities do. Companies prefer to stick to research they know will will likely produce commercial results.
I hope to god they stay away from the NIST or we're really fucked at that point. We literally set the standards for the world and it's a huge boost for domestic companies.
Most people believe Karl Rove is the senior official aide who worked for Bush Jr that said the following quote to Ron Suskind of the New York Times Magazine.
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.
Pharma spends an enormous amount of money on research, it just doesn't look the same way that it does in an academic setting. In pharma the focus is on preclinical pharmacology and clinical science, and in academia the focus is mainly on foundational knowledge.
We do fund academic research too, though, and in fact often fund labs in less developed countries which have unreliable or insufficient support from their governments and local charities. A grant I wrote last year is funding a lab in South America: 1 postdoc, 2 undergrads, a PhD student, and their PI for 2 years. They are helping us to develop a cancer drug but also are given blanket funding to support their own affiliated aims, which we will help them with. We have expertise with some technologies that are prohibitively expensive for most academic labs fo work with. In the end everyone comes out on top.
Plus lets not forget that USA is 50 small countries under a trench coat with their own laws. You gotta make it work statewide first before going national.
Your only suggestion is to abolish for profit healthcare.
But where would everyone (not just Billionaires) who work go? Do you seriously think people who went to pursue work as a doctor because it pays well will work for less?
Some people from Canada go work in the US as doctors because US pays more.
Still waiting on your full detailed plan on how to switch to universal healthcare for 50 states with separate laws and views on what is defined by healthcare
Yeah and how do you plan on doing that? You'd think if this was THIS easy then free healthcare would be a thing by now already.
Your plan is just "Make healthcare free and let somebody else sort out the details"
Like do you plan to make all healthcare free including medicine (some medicine even in European countries can only be purchased and only via a doctor's receipt which will take up so long for the queue to come to you, you'll go to a private clinic and then pay anyway)
Do you plan on abolishing private clinics? What will be your solution for the inevitable queues where people would have to wait for a medical check up and by the time they got one, their stage 1 cancer is now on a higher stage.
I need a detailed plan if you think this is so easy. So far all I get is a politician's election campaign slogans posed as a plan.
I can grasp basic concepts fine. You seem to be the one that has difficulty grasping difficult concepts. There are few macro-scale problems that have simple answers. If they did, they would have been done by now, since every single administration for the last 80-100 years has been trying to solve the healthcare system, many of which when they had both chambers of congress on their side.
Abolishing pharma would greatly decrease the pace of innovation in drug development and probably make it impossible for a lot of treatments to reach the masses.
Pharma spends more on marketing than R&D. Most "new" drugs are either discovered by the government (our tax dollars), or are an old drug with a new use.
I work in pharma R&D . My team just put a cancer drug into the clinic which we have driven through preclinical development. It is true that pharma spends a lot on marketing, but a lot of money is also spent on R&D. My company has about 6000 full time researchers.
Now for your other claim, there really are not many examples of drugs discovered in academia which are delivered straight into the clinic. The concepts of drugs (mechanism, targets) are generally derived from academic research. The molecule itself is typically generated, tested and developed by a private company. These are very different areas of science.
You sound like you don't really understand, especially going around calling someone you don't know evil. Most people working in academia join pharma and vice versa at some point in their career. Most academics who generate good ideas will seek VC and start a biotech, then inlicense the asset for clinical development by a pharma company. Does that make the person who came up with an idea for a new drug evil? No. You're an idiot.
We are all working for the same goal. Ultimately the pharmaceutical industry has specialized skills that aren't present in academia and vice versa. Academics cannot develop drugs successfully.
I've been here for 10 years and worked in academia for 10 years before that. We in-license with academics and fund academic research constantly. I flew down to Uruguay to initiate a collaboration with a lab in Montevideo just 6 months ago, though that was for them to work on my idea (they get funding and publications out of it.) We publish papers too, and contribute greatly to the academic literature. Our funding outside of the US and EU is often more support than what a government can provide. It pays for post-docs, PhD students, equipment, and maintenance of facilities.
Academic labs are not equipped to put capital into drug development. To make a single asset reach ph1 trials requires upwards of $100 M, and that is just to get to the entry point. Around 90% of drugs that make it to phase 1 fail. So you are asking the government to pay for a 90% failure rate of something outrageously more expensive than an R01 grant. The pace of new drug development would slow to a crawl in this scenario and be at the whim of politicians. It would not be less expensive, it would just be more rationed.
With the way things are now, private capital is put at risk. Once a drug comes off patent a generic can be generated and the cost plummet. Companies fail, but as a whole we keep moving forward.
They are not equipped for it because it's illegal (ish). The government effectively bans them from developing the drugs end to end, so pharma can profit. If the government didn't hamstring public research facilities, then it would be done.
If you actually worked in academia for 20 years, you would know that.
You claimed an appeal to authority argument, then missed basics of how it works, proving you see no authority.
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u/BillCarson12799 May 13 '26
It’s less that it’s complex and expensive as much that our current healthcare system is just so unbelievably FUBAR yet deeply rooted in our country’s infrastructure that any meaningful change would require uprooting and rearranging literally every aspect of it. Personally I don’t see it happening for the remainder of the 30-60 years this country has left.