Medicare is not sustainable. You want to end up like Greece? Cuba? Venezuela? Soviet Union?
Medicare must be fixed or eliminated. Its called math. Learn some math, and then figure out Medicare is going broke.
Agreed. Some say this is proof of the left's Cloward-Piven strategy.
At any rate, medical costs have skyrocketed primarily due to government intervention. Has anything gone up as much as healthcare costs?
Something must be done, but if Rs try to control it the MSM and libs everywhere will condemn it to fear monger the elderly. So...I suspect nothing will be done during Trump's time.
It should be remembered the Obama and Congress cut Social Security and the MSM and the Left said nothing. Most Americans do not know anything of this cut.
Due to insurances and drug ads on TV, they spend more on ads that they do R & D.
That's actually not the problem. Drug companies are always going to run ads, as long as it works. That's not the issue.
The problem is intellectual property rights, which I'm keen to reform.... or eliminate.
When a drug companies has a patent run out on it's drug, whatever drug, the market is usually flooded with generic alternatives that drop the profitability down to zero.
As a result drug companies figure out that if they modified the existing drug ever so slightly, they can get a new patent. This patent allows them to once again produce basically the same thing, but with patent protection, thus allowing profitability.
The problem though is that the original drug is still on the market. So you have two nearly identical drugs, that do the same thing, but one has a high price and one has a low price.
So the question is, how do you get people to use the new slightly more expensive drug, rather than the older cheaper drug, when they do the same thing? Answer: Advertising.
Now the left would love to live in their regulation fantasy world, where you can just pass some regulation to stop this.
That's impossible. While we know the drug companies are doing these actions, it is not possible for us to know with certainty which drugs are simply modified existing drugs, and which are entirely new drugs that do the same thing only better, or even which drugs are being modified with the intention of improving the quality of the drug, rather than just getting a new patent.
Any attempt to regulate away the problem, will only kill off research and development, resulting in less advancement in medications.
The solution is deregulation, by removing intellectual property rights.
By removing patent protections, companies will be forced to both innovate and compete on price, instead of competing at finding the best patent.
On the opposite side, if you try and regulate your way to a better system, you'll end up like France, which hasn't had a significant drug related advancement in over 20 years. All the companies left France, to do R&D elsewhere, and most new drugs are not available in France at all.
Additionally, while advertising spending is significantly lower in France, that doesn't mean the money isn't spent.... it is just directed elsewhere. Instead of spending the money on trying to convince consumers to buy their product, now they spend millions on million trying to convince regulators to buy the product.
The most famous example was a drug that translated roughly "fatty legs" which the company selling it spent millions to convince the French regulators to allow the drug in France, and have the government pay for it. As it turns out after more than a decade on the market, the company attempted to get the FDA to approve it. The FDA declined after they found it was basically a sugar pill... ironic given the name.
If you do the same thing in the US, millions of dollars will flow to the FDA instead of advertising. Either way, the drug company is going to spend money to get someone to buy the pill.
The solution is free-market capitalism. It always works. We should try it.
