Posted on 01/26/2016 9:18:54 AM PST by SeekAndFind
bkmk
I don't trust Heritage. Sorry, info is right but they pushed Pre-RomneyCare.
“I’m for having zero, absolutely zero involvement with .gov and drugs.”
Government has dug a big hole that Americans have fallen into.
The hole was dug by federal government granted drug patent monopolies which didn’t require drugs to be sold at affordable prices. The hole was made dangerously deep by state governments requiring private insurers pay for FDA approved drugs regardless of price. After drugs were made expensive by state mandates, Medicare was forced to pump in hundreds of billions of federal dollars.
How does one unwind the mess? By asking consumers to pay something, with reasonably affordable contributions based on the value consumers are getting. Future patents and FDA approvals should be conditioned to require individual affordability for all consumers.
He’s STILL acting like a CEO rather than Presidential....that’s all he knows and foolishly believes he can step into the Presidency as a CEO.....smack dab into the Constitution.... “Limiting his power”....
bfl
My wife is a controller/accountant in a rural hospital and TennCare nearly destroyed them. Getting paid .50 cents on the dollar. She told me they had figured for example how much it cost the hospital to xray for a broken arm and these figures are by no means correct. With the xray machine, techs, radiologist, maintenance etc... $100 and they recoup their overhead and make a respectable profit.
In comes Medicare and they say you will accept $35 for this xray period. So right off the bat any profit is gone and they are not even meeting overhead. Medicaid pays even worse! So they have to charge the patients with insurance and paying out of pocket even more to try and recoup losses from the government Medicare/Medicaid.
And the government made the interstate highway system before a lot of people were born. So what?
People act like we wouldn't have electricity and highways if it weren't for the federal government. We'd probably have the best schools in the world if it weren't for government. Government is just promoting our general welfare though, right?
Nothing like big government conservatism.
Total nonsense. Without patent protection you would have no innovation. You come to FR to argue in favor of government mandated price controls without any understanding of basic economics or how the profit motive, and a competitive economy, drives innovation.
It can cost up to $2 billion dollars to bring a NME to market thanks to the beloved government you say should mandate that products be sold at affordable prices. 95% of everything that begins in a pharmaceutical lab never makes it to clinical trials. Of the 5% that do, more than 80% o them fail. One out of every 5,000 new drugs is actually commercialized. Yeah, the drug companies are ripping us off. Let's take your logic, such as it is, to the inevitable conclusion....we need the government to force the food companies to provide food at more affordable prices, and cars, and flat screen TV's...with enough government involvement, we'll never have to pay high prices again. Voila, utopia!
And that may well be but I have private insurance and they also don’t pay the full amount even though it appears the doctors office/hospital way overcharges. The insurance company apparently has a “negotiated price” so who is paying the full amount? People without insurance? The office/hospital never gets paid the full amount?
I used to have a very different type insurance, a high deductible plan with a health savings account. The doctors would give me a 10% discount for cash but it appears I was getting screwed because having private insurance they pay way less than a 10% discount.
The whole thing is screwy.
Healthcare is already heavily regulated and controlled directly or indirectly through Medicare/Medicaid.
Instead of the hodgepodge of corrupt state-by-state 'deals' and patchwork quilt of existing regulations, why not replace it with one open, national set of negotiations where everyone can have their say? And one enormous, national insurance pool (not one company or single payer).
The chance of the Cato Institute's preferred policies being enacted regarding healthcare are about as close to absolute zero as politically imaginable.
I lived under the German healthcare system and it works much better than here, while I find our system a nightmare.
You're misguided for many reasons. First, the idea that government is intrinsically superior to a spontaneous and free(r) market is absurd.
Additionally, the US is the world's largest producer of medical technology and provides varying levels and availability of services Germany can only dream of.
Finally, like it is with so many state managed healthcare systems, the strategic objective in Germany is to reduce supply. We're trying our best to join them, so suggesting that we need to be more like these kinds of systems cannot be justified by anything other than emotions. The healthcare system needs to be subjected to market forces in the worst way, not some national set of negotiations that government lords over. I don't know anything about Cato's solution to our healthcare system, but I think it's not working for you because you have to pay for a larger portion of your care rather than using OPM like in Germany.
I heard the exact same story from Ross Perot, explaining why GM’s purchase of EDS was such a great deal for GM. EDS would save so much money from administrating health care that it would pay the entire price. Perot was dead wrong.
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