Posted on 06/29/2012 7:28:02 PM PDT by neverdem
With Obamacare, there will be four social classes of American people, non-contributing recipients, those exempted from the system by wavers(to be termed "wavers"), screwers and screwees. Don't worry. Great care will be taken so those of us designated to be the screwees will be screwed equally.
Just remember, you can run but you just can't hide from Obamacare.
With this reasoning, all the vast improvements to Personal Computers would make them prohibitively expensive today. The Radio Shack TRS-80 debuted in 1977 with a 1.7 Mh processor and 4K of RAM for $600. $600 can buy you a a decent 2.4 Gh dual-core with 2 gig RAM today. And $600 today is worth a LOT less than it was in 1977. With this guys reasoning a PC of today should cost, say, $6000 or more!
In looking at obamacare we also need to consider some political myths;
Myth #1 the GOP will repeal obamacare. This is clearly a myth. In much the same way that the GOP tacitly supports illegal immigration, it supports obamacare. Keep in mind that there is going to be plenty of money made fleecing the taxpayers and the GOP, or perhaps more accurately, those who matter in the GOP, want their share of the boodle. This is not to say that the GOP won’t put on a good show of attempting a repeal, but rest assured that it will always be just a little too hard to do.
Myth #2 we need to elect GOP candidates so we can put more “conservatives” on the courts. This is particularly laughable given recent events.
There is nothing to fix. It is broken beyond repair. The total system is going to fail.
Any element of it that could be fixed will be fought over by both parties.
Neither side wants to fix it, they want to replace medicare with deathcare
My first computer cost $300 (not including tax or tape drive) in the early 1980's. Prices dropped off for awhile, to the point that one could get the same thing for $79, but but after awhile it became hard to find a newly-manufactured computer that cheap. The price point of the cheapest available mass-produced computer went up quite a bit before finally coming back down.
We pay a lot more than that for ones the don't work, so why not?
The idea that any treatment runs more than a million dollars is a testament to legalized robbery that the health industry performa regularly.
I don't have the actual figures at my fingertips, but it's like this:
Medical care has become ten times more effective since the 1950s, while simultaneously becoming (only) five times as expensive - so we shouldn't complain about "exploding health costs" because we're still getting a lot of "bang for our buck."
NOTE: Even if it were the other way around - (only) 5X as effective and 10X as costly, we still shouldn't complain, since that pentupling of quality (high-resolution CAT scans, heart transplantations, etc.) wouldn't have been available at ANY PRICE in the 1950s.
Computers have become a billion (or trillion?) times more effective (thanks to Moore's Law), but are only five times as expensive: Today any regular, commercially available Smartphone has more raw computing power than ALL of NASA's computers in the 1960s.
Regards,
We need some help with price controls.
Here in Washington state Regence has a surplus far beyond what it needs and quite literally ripped people off in a variety of ways. One of the really cute things they did was refer people to a phone line on Thursdays only and then no one ever answered the phone. Ever.
Look I don't want the IRS or the federal govt in my healthcare but many many health insurance companies are as corrupt as they come...
Very good article in general. One thing I noticed though, in the Myth #1 about the “price” of health care soaring, he should have talked about how having the gubmint involved in health care in an ever increasing role has driven up COST (just like everything else that gubmint puts their filthy hands on).
The main "cost driver" in "healthcare inflation" is FREE HEALTHCARE!
Or, as PJ O'Rourke put it: If you think healthcare is expensive now, just wait till it's free.
Excellent piece. For those interested in more of the same, consider visiting the Covert Rationing Blog (covertrationingblog.com). In particular, the author has an on-line book called Open Wide and Say Moo where he dissects many of these issues in a brilliant and witty way. He also called the SCOTUS ruling correctly two years ago. And no, I have no relationship to the blogger. I just appreciate good writing and thinking.
Also, the linked blog Stumblingontruth is excellent. Loved the leftists lexicon.
There is a significant difference between computer and medical R&D. Computers don't have to be tested by thousands of customers before they can be sold to the general public, while every medical advance must be extensively tested. In the case of drugs and medical devices, the testing involves thousands of patients for several years before it can even be considered for the FDA approval. Any but the most trivial change in a medical device means it must be tested and approved by the FDA all over again. The cost of medical research is high, and that is a cost that cannot be disregarded in the cost of the final product. Computers are very amenable to mass production technology, which is great for bringing down prices. Other than the most simple procedures (like vaccination), I can't think of too much medicine that can be delivered on an assembly line.
I worked for a small pharmaceutical company as a payroll and accounts payable manager back in the late ‘90s, early 2000’s. Long before a drug can even go to “clinical trials” and tested on people in a controlled setting, it takes many years and from what I saw, millions and millions of dollars and man hours spent on bio-chem research in the lab and then on to animal testing, with FDA applications made at several intervals. I saw the invoices and it was not unusual for my department to have check runs in the millions on a weekly basis, some of the outsourced animal testing invoices alone could be several hundreds of thousands of dollars just for one study.
And sometimes a new drug never makes it out of the lab or out of animal studies yet it still costs millions of dollars. Seeing firsthand the costs involved, I never again questioned why many prescription drugs are so expensive.
The company I worked for successfully developed a very specialized drug for Glioblastoma multiforme, the most aggressive and malignant type of brain tumor. They also developed a fast acting surgical anesthetic with fewer side effects than others in use. But along the way it cost a whole lot of money to get those drugs through the FDA approval process and into the hands of doctors and into patients, the clinical trials and follow up being also very expensive and there were many, many drugs that never went anywhere, never got out of the lab. Even with their successes, they eventually ran out of cash and the company was bought out by a larger pharma. I’ve heard it said that it takes at least 10 years for an upstart pharmaceutical to turn a profit.
And the manufacturing process for drugs is also very expensive; the clean rooms and highly specialized equipment involved, not to mention the quality control and specialized and highly trained and highly paid people needed. You just don’t put an ad in the local paper for “assembly line” or minimum wage workers in pharma manufacturing.
Exactly. I'm a basic researcher, so I look at the basic biological mechanisms that are or may be susceptible to drug intervention--meaning that my work is necessary even before the drugs can be developed. Scientists at the basic level are busily trying to develop new assays to weed out bad drugs long before they ever reach the clinical trial pipeline. I've seen a statistic that only about 1 out of 100 new drug candidates ever makes it to clinical use. Given the costs associated with R&D, the earlier those bad candidates can be weeded out, the better.
Unfortunately, there are way too many people--a depressing number of conservatives, even--who denounce the profits of "big pharma" and the high price of new drugs without having even a basic understanding of the expenses incurred while developing those new drugs. It's too easy to demonize "big pharma" when people are constantly reminded of the profits while being kept ignorant of the costs.
Yep. Exactly. And the same sort of “logic” or lack there of, is often used against the oil industry. Many people are ignorantly unaware of the upfront costs to find oil and drill wells, the costs of getting that oil out of the ground including all the regulatory costs. But Godz Forbid that those “evil” oil companies actually make a profit for their efforts. And some people also fail to realize how much of that gross profit goes back into R&D and employee wages and benefits. That’s true for both pharma’s and the oil industry and in fact for many companies.
I currently work for a manufacturing, company in PA, a small division of a large UK owned company with worldwide subsidiaries. My division manufactures components for conveyance and power transmission systems; specialized polymer belts, o-rings and transmission systems used in a wide range of other industries including but not limited to mining, food processing, and industrial HVAC systems. Fortunately we are profitable even in this bad economy and are currently in a hiring and expansion mode. But without profits, we would not be able to expand, do R&D to develop new products, improve our manufacturing processes and expand our product lines that keep people working and provide new jobs. My division is also very active in donating to and giving back to the local community. For example, when the town we are located in was severely flooded last year after a tropical storm, we donated money, trucks, manpower and appliances to the local aid effort, several thousand of dollars. We couldn’t do that if we were not profitable.
And without profits, we would also not be able to give raises, provide an excellent benefit package and pay the type of wages necessary to find the best people for the engineering and product development positions that keep us profitable and cutting edge in our industry. Even our lowest level assembly line workers make a relatively high hourly wage, get a generous profit sharing and benefit package compared to other similar manufacturing companies in the area. BTW – we are not union :), .
Yet some of the same people who denounce the “profits” of “Big Pharma” and “Big Oil” have no problem shelling out big bucks for the latest I-phone or I-pad or some other technology gadget with seemingly little if any concern about the profitably of those companies. But the high cost to develop products prescription drugs and gasoline shouldn’t matter; they should be cheap if not “free” for everyone and come out of thin air and no company engaged in such, should ever make a profit.
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