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Guillermou's avatar
Guillermou
9h

The US healthcare system is complex, expensive, and inefficient. All actors in healthcare, from doctors to insurers and pharmaceutical companies, operate in a heavily regulated and massively subsidized industry riddled with structural distortions. Patient care is conditioned by the economic incentives that create these distortions. The United States has built a healthcare system with incentives that inexorably produce terrible and perverse outcomes—incentives that do not emphasize health and well-being. Nutrition, exercise, education, emotional security, our natural environment, and public safety may now be more important than care in producing greater advances in longevity and quality of life.

“Money is honey,” my grandmother used to tell me, “but health is wealth.” She said “health,” not “healthcare.” Listening to debates over healthcare reform, it is sometimes difficult to remember that there is a difference.

Some aspects that independent leaders, not pressured by the Pharmaceutical Mafia, should consider:

1. 45% of the pharmaceutical industry's total combined revenue came solely from sales in the US. With only 4-5% of the world's population and 33% of the population of the developed world, this accounts for 45% of all pharmaceutical revenue.

2. The annual financial reports of 13 large pharmaceutical companies over the last 8 years reveal that these companies spend heavily on research, but they also include marketing budgets in their doctor visits and advertising expenses. The highest drug prices in the world translate into high corporate profits and numerous television commercials. Some of the "research" money is actually used to make mediocre products seem better than they really are. The very idea of ​​pharmaceutical "research" is called into question: pharmaceutical research is sometimes virtually indistinguishable from marketing.

Hiring practicing physicians to evaluate new drugs creates a potential conflict of interest for these doctors, further blurring the line between research and marketing. Many of the same physicians who will eventually prescribe these new drugs to their patients are initially hired by pharmaceutical companies to evaluate the drugs. And it is their evaluation that is presented to the FDA as part of the decision on whether the drug is worth approving for patient use. Furthermore, the pharmaceutical industry is responsible for approximately 65% ​​of the FDA's budget for overseeing drugs for human use.

3. United States law prohibits the US government from taking a very active role in negotiating the prices charged by pharmaceutical companies. It is the only major world government that refuses to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies. Instead, pharmacy profit managers are used to negotiate, and these managers tend to side with the pharmaceutical companies and actually prefer higher drug prices. A large number of people, and several politicians, have proposed re-importing medicines from smaller countries that have successfully negotiated lower prices for these drugs.

https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/drug-price-negotiation-doesnt-mean-the-government-will-restrict-access-to-medicines/ (08/12/2022)

4. The process used is called "perennial" patenting. Minimal changes are made to guarantee high prices. Traditionally, there has been a lack of regulation by the Food and Drug Administration regarding the development of generic drugs, and in many cases, pharmaceutical companies make deals and pay to prevent generics from being marketed. In 2013, pharmaceutical companies got the U.S. Supreme Court to allow them to pay generic drug manufacturers to delay the release of generic equivalents of drugs for a period of time after a drug's patent expires.

5. As Americans spend more and more of their income to pay rising health insurance premiums and deductibles, major insurance companies are making record profits. A December survey found that 46% of insured adults struggle to pay out-of-pocket expenses, and 29% have not taken prescription drugs because they are too expensive.

https://www.live5news.com/2022/02/03/health-insurance-companies-make-record-profits-costs-soar-us/

6. Hospitals actually make money when a patient develops complications during and after surgery. This is called a "contribution margin," taken from casualty insurance, which compensates hospitals and doctors for making mistakes.

https://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/The-economics-of-patient-safety-March-2017.pdf

The federal government already spends eight times more on health care than on education, 12 times more than it spends on food assistance for children and families, 30 times more than it spends on law enforcement, 78 times more than it spends on land management and conservation, 87 times more than it spends on water supply, and 830 times more than it spends on energy conservation.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-american-health-care-killed-my-father/307617/

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Just steve's avatar
Just steve
3hEdited

Health Insurance is not health care. Insurance is a way to pay for healthcare. When the States pays the most and receives bottom status compared to all the rest of Western Countries, shows better structures are possible. Somehow we can't figure something out. Once place quality and costs are influenced, depends on how insurance is structured. Subsidized to capture a risk pool of low income, those plagued with chronic illness to profit For Profit Health Insurance. Bean counters, pencil pushers creating cookie cutter check the box treatments. Then too, Doctors needing to carry Malpractice Insurance mandating another layer of check the boxes whether needed or not bury the Doctors' in never ending boondoggle paperwork and separate them from being focused on Health Care.

Then too all the other Too Big's feeding from the same trough, Financials, AG, Ag Chem's, Big Pharma, Educational Centers, Media and more. So many trillions beyond the 5 plus trillion on Maintain the Symptoms after we first get sick system. All these trillions that could possibly be redirected to increase the public and our individual health.

If the memory is working when we had a huge industrial base they in a sense underwrote what was I believe a Not For Profit Health Insurance Structure with Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Blue Cross Blue Shield covering most and more each year. And today, the Health Insurance focus on Profits is still tied to businesses, adding much costs to services and goods, especially as to where we find ourselves now, smaller, regional businesses and Mom and Pops along with the Risk Pool of those outside those structures to include seniors affecting costs of Medicare and Medicaid.

From the bottom looking up, so much is structured to capture Treadmill Pill Consumers - (we are no longer patients,) until we can no longer walk the treadmill.

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