Bail Out the Labs
This is not dry, wonky, financial stuff. This is as human interest as it gets:
Merck, the drug company, reported quarterly earnings this morning, and among other things, according to CNBC, said they’d be shutting down some research facilities to cut costs. This would reduce expenses and improve the company’s bottom line, which in turn, should benefit their shareholders.
What it doesn’t improve is our quality and possibly length of life, as research is curtailed on finding cures for diseases both common and uncommon. It ends up costing the government (via Medicare), the corporate sector (via lost work hours and the cost of health insurance for employees), and we the people, as it’s well known that the cost of prevention is far less than the cost of hospitalization and intense (not to mention intensive) care.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and all that.
If the Treasury wants to make an investment that’s going to pay for itself and then some, contribute meaningfully to our well being, and lessen the burden of the overwhelming cost of health care, they should throw a few billion at medical research facilities while they’re busy putting expensive band-aids of questionable value on the wounds of avarice.
If hundreds of billions can bail out the bacteria on Wall Street, a fraction of that can go toward the investigation of bacteria sitting in a petri dish.
Save money, save lives. Win-win.
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How would a state run NHS, like we have over here in the UK, go down with the American public? I know that the UK is famous for its high rates of taxation, and yes, most of it is totally over the top, but when my son was born, I wouldn’t have had him and my wife in the care of anyone else. I see the plight of Americans without health insurance and am always totally disgusted. The thought of having a system like you have over here in the UK is terrifying. How do people cope? There’s no way I could afford health insurance! I know that the USA is double uber anti-socialism and that our NHS is state run, but surely everyone has an equal right to health care and, therefore, LIFE?
The drug companies are the scourge of our health system. They push for maximum profits and take the money our hospitals and doctors surgeries need for their own profit. But that’s the problem with this system. It always serves the interests of the few!
UKB
hey UKB. depends, as usual, on how it’s framed and by who. the uninsured who have trouble coping are the ones who had insurance and lost it. the ones who never had it are used to waiting their turn at emergency rooms.
it’s a perfect shitstorm. it’s also a real sadness for the people who aren’t covered.
thanks for your insights from across the pond. LK
UKB in theory, in the UK every patient of the NHS is treated well. The reality is different — doctors get a bonus for NOT referring too many patients to specialists (I kid you not), drugs that cost too much (where ‘too much’ can be as low as $1 a day) are withheld even when the consequences are dire, we have old people left to get blind and demented before their time deliberately, since they are not deemed worth saving, it’s even calculated in QALY years by NICE (the rationing quango) what a patients life is ‘worth’ — if you’re too expensive that’s tough luck, you get abandoned to fester and die.
A desperate midwife shortage and filthy wards where hospital acquired infections are rampant make childbirth a sinister lottery, the list of desperate failings in the NHS is very long, and because the state pays whether the service is good or not, a lot of NHS staff just don’t care very much and often see patients as an annoyance, asking a second opinion is frowned upon. The managers and accountants run the place with an iron fist and their upkeep is often more expensive than the actual health care side.
Btw, it’s not unusual to have to wait 2 years to get a needed operation, even if your problem is very painful. It is a standard 8 weeks wait before you see a specialist even in many cases, which is a lot of ‘fun’ if you have cancer or heart problems.
So, be careful what you wish for, the NHS experience is also observable in Canada, have a look there what people say about their health service, it’s fairly much the same: twice the cost of a private one, but no chance of getting looked after properly.
Most people in the UK don’t trust the NHS and purchase BUPA cover. So you get to pay the public AND the private service, or you can take your chance and risk dying to the NHS’s rationing.