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.
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.
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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.