Comment by simondotau
14 hours ago
Nobody is advocating for eliminating a market-based system. My country (Australia) has both single-payer and a market-based private healthcare system.
14 hours ago
Nobody is advocating for eliminating a market-based system. My country (Australia) has both single-payer and a market-based private healthcare system.
You can imagine how that system, like most, is actually getting its medical advancements from the US.
This… is a think that people believe, but it’s not as simple as that. Most basic research is universities, all over the place. Many drugs are developed in Europe. A lot of medical machinery is developed and made in Europe (Siemens, Philips and Roche are huge in this space). Like most things, med tech is fairly globalised.
And let's not forget that a substantial amount of medical research performed in the USA is not market-based but rather publicly funded through the NIH.
1 reply →
Most of that is funded by the NIH and not by the local systems. Spending money is easy.
> This… is a think that people believe, but it’s not as simple as that.
This is a thing people believe because pharmaceutical companies keep repeating it. And to be fair, they're not entirely wrong in that getting a drug/treatment from the lab to the pharmacy is incredibly expensive because most drugs don't work and clinical trials are super expensive.
It does seem to me that a better system would be to split out the research/development and manufacturing of pharmaceuticals into the lab development (scientists), the clinical trials (should be government funded) and the manufacturing (this could easily be done via contract).
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This is a comforting lie Americans tell themselves to justify being ripped off.
You pay double the OECD average, and more per person for healthcare than the Swiss - and that's only counting the publicly funded parts!
This implies the US is subsidizing the world's healthcare system and sacrificing it's own citizens for the benefit of every non-American.
You're ok with that?
This doesn't make any sense. If you make a thing, the price you set for selling that thing in a country has little to do with where you happen to be living when you made that thing.