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Re:High US health care spending explained by its high materi... by arcticbull on Sunday March 12, 2017 @11:32PM (#13855041)
First, not everything needs a direct and unrestricted profit motive, and I draw the line on that where people don't have a choice whether to engage in a service or not and whether providing that service provides in general a good above and beyond the person in question.

Fire: it's to everyones' benefit if a persons' house catches fire to prevent burning down the neighborhood.

Education: all society benefits from more educated youth.

Prison: all society benefits from remediation of people with criminal tendencies (not punishment, btw, but preventing it from happening again)

Police: everyone benefits from lower crime rates.

Health: everyone benefits when people who are sick are treated to prevent infecting those around them, and people tend not to have a choice in whether they get sick, it's something that happens to them beyond their control.

It's strange to me that people tend to draw the line just before they get to health. They see the benefits to society of everything else on the list being socialized (most do, anyways) but they don't map it to health.

There's no risk of demolishing a profit motive. Canadian doctors get paid upwards of $300,000 per year. Nobody there is suffering. Patents ensure that even when realistically negotiated, drug companies can secure a healthy profit for novel drugs. Drug reasearch often funded by public money.

It's also strange to me that your argument for not covering many Americans is that doing so hurts people beyond the border. You should look out for the broader good but why not look out for yourself and your neighbors first? As much as I'm a globalist I don't think it's worth sacrificing American lives to the nebulous goal of trickle-down healthcare to people outside America. Can you cite some evidence of the effectiveness? I'm not an American, by the way, and I'm all in favor of exporting surplus healthcare, and I feel like you should make sure you've got your house in order first.

Re:High US health care spending explained by its high materi... by malandrew on Monday March 13, 2017 @01:31AM (#13855456)
What percent of new medicines and treatments developed are developed in Canada? How does that compare to the US?
Re:High US health care spending explained by its high materi... by arcticbull on Monday March 13, 2017 @04:07AM (#13856023)
Based on conversations in other threads, it has been posited that it isn't the profit motive pushing that but rather the US governments' heavy investment in drug research [1], [2].

Canada doesn't have a big drug sector to the best of my knowledge though playing along, plenty of countries with socialized medicine do:

Denmark has Novo Nordisk.

Germany has Boeringer Ingelheim and Bayer.

Switzerland has Roche.

Astra/Zeneca is Swedish/British.

GlaxoSmithKlein is British.

Sanofi is French.

Novartis is Swiss.

Actually, of the top 10 by revenue, only two (Johnson and Johnson, and Pfizer, #1 and #3 respectively) are American. All the rest are European. Assuming based on the references that development has more to do with funding, I'm willing to bet the EU spends an awful lot.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/YourMoney/story?id=129651

[2] http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/who_pays