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I agree completely with you on this, so the tone of my post later on isn’t directed at you at all.

People make poor decisions about their health under stress, I personally have made a few terrible ones.

A few years ago I was pretty hammered and shattered the bones in one of my fingers, broke it completely in three or four places...and I let a woman set it for me on the spot. A woman I didn’t even know who saw it happen and came over to help. She straightened it (no anesthetic) used a paper clip for a splint and electrical tape to bind it, and I drove 18 hours home and waited another day to go to the hospital.

That counts as a bad, BAD medical decision...but I am only unable to straighten my finger...it didn’t cost me my life.

Where I take exception with all this is not the poor woman...she might well have died anyway. I take issue with the demonization of “Greedy Big Pharm”. People on this very conservative forum want price controls or whatever, which is the most ridiculous and un-conservative concept out there.

We live in a society that is full of goods and services which we can access for money. If we let liberal dummies convince us that the profit motive should be disregarded here (because THIS is so important) then, yeah, the drug in question might be more “affordable” for $10 instead of $116, but...there won’t be any supply of it. Just think of what happens in places where they institute price controls on gasoline (USA, 1973) and recall what happened then. We took out the profit motive, so who the hell is going to pump oil, refine it, and ship it all across the country to gas stations so we can put it in our car, and do that at a loss? NOBODY. Which means...Tah Dahh! You get even/odd license plate days to buy gas, and even then you can’t get it.

Or putting rent controls on housing in cities like New York and San Francisco. End result? It is a great deal to have one of those rent controlled apartments, so much so that you WILL them to a family member when you pass on. But some poor schmuck who needs a place to live will NEVER get a place, because when you remove the profit motive, no new housing is built, and the housing that exists becomes poorly maintained or simply is taken out of the housing market because renting property becomes unprofitable and a real losing proposition, so they sell their building or let it slide.

Tell a pharmaceutical company (as some people on here advocate) that a ceiling is set on the price of a flu drug, because we know the ingredients and packaging only add up $3.25 spent, so we will set the price at $4 because we think that 75 cent profit you make should be enough. They are being quite generous. But that means that any money they spent developing it is not recouped, and far less money will be spent on developing new drugs because it just isn’t worth it. And we end up with situations where you can get the drug at that nice $4 cost...if you can find it.

It is the fundamental reason socialism/centralized control DOES NOT WORK. What works is to let people vote with their dollar bills held above their heads, and that invisible hand of capitalism will let prices find the supportable level, and ensure that the quantity of drugs needed are produced and sent to the areas that have the most dollar bills held above their heads.

I agree with people that the government involvement in this via Medicare, etc. skews the system. But THAT is a different problem to be approached a different way.

We used to live in a country where the son of a sitting President could step on something on the White House lawn, develop an infection, and DIE from it. It still happens in places around the world. But now that is rare, because we allow (to a degree) the profit motive to drive drug production and distribution.

I want to keep it that way.