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Yes. The US makes up 42% of GLOBAL healthcare spend. Let alone R&D budget. We might see less medical innovation if the US adopted socialized medicine. https://w

Yes. The US makes up 42% of GLOBAL healthcare spend. Let alone R&D budget. We might see less medical innovation if the US adopted socialized medicine. https://www.mhaonline.com/blog/healthcare-debates-funding-medical-research https://www.mhaonline.com/blog/healthcare-debates-funding-me...

oblio 4y ago
That's just BS, sorry. They could, you know, become more efficient with their spending. The medical industry in the US has such a huge overhead, it's scandalous. You're feeding millions of administrative leeches.
- irrational 4y ago
  When has a large corporation become more efficient with their spending to that degree? From the figures being thrown around, if their profits from the USA suddenly dropped by 90%, that isn’t just becoming more efficient, that is having to severely contract.
  - oblio 4y ago
    You do know that if profits go down, companies don't have to contract, right? Companies contract when they have losses... (or when their revenue goes down, but only if they predict it will keep going down, while in this case this would be a 1-time shock). I see a bunch of people defending these corporations, I have to ask: why? Why are you defending corporations with tens if not hundreds of thousands of employees and decades of years of profits in the mid-to-high tens of billions of dollars? Their abuses are well documented, is it Stockholm syndrome?
    - riversflow 4y ago
      I’ll bite, I think the defense is mostly to the status quo of the industry. The fact of the matter is these corporations have developed and tested medicines that drastically improve my parents (and many many elderly/retirement age folks) quality of life, and some of these medicines are pretty new. The system is currently working pretty good by the metric of pharmaceutical advances.
    - sershe 4y ago
      Because they mostly have a proven track record of advancing human well-being? As do other corporations from railroads to Amazon. Sure, they are not perfect, but the governments you advocate should kneecap them (to echo your other general comment) have a track record of ruining it, /especially/ when they try to decide what's "fair/unfair". You are defending a much larger, more powerful, vastly more evil and harmful entity.
dmitriid 4y ago
> Yes. The US makes up 42% of GLOBAL healthcare spend. A lot of that healthcare spend is wasted on administrative overhead of the US system. "U.S. insurers and providers spent $812 billion on administration, amounting to $2497 per capita (34.2% of national health expenditures) versus $551 per capita (17.0%) in Canada: $844 versus $146 on insurers' overhead; $933 versus $196 for hospital administration; $255 versus $123 for nursing home, home care, and hospice administration; and $465 versus $87 for physicians' insurance-related costs. Of the 3.2-percentage point increase in administration's share of U.S. health expenditures since 1999, 2.4 percentage points was due to growth in private insurers' overhead, mostly because of high overhead in their Medicare and Medicaid managed-care plans." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31905376/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31905376/

oblio 4y ago

That's just BS, sorry. They could, you know, become more efficient with their spending. The medical industry in the US has such a huge overhead, it's scandalous. You're feeding millions of administrative leeches.

irrational 4y ago
When has a large corporation become more efficient with their spending to that degree? From the figures being thrown around, if their profits from the USA suddenly dropped by 90%, that isn’t just becoming more efficient, that is having to severely contract.
- oblio 4y ago
  You do know that if profits go down, companies don't have to contract, right? Companies contract when they have losses... (or when their revenue goes down, but only if they predict it will keep going down, while in this case this would be a 1-time shock). I see a bunch of people defending these corporations, I have to ask: why? Why are you defending corporations with tens if not hundreds of thousands of employees and decades of years of profits in the mid-to-high tens of billions of dollars? Their abuses are well documented, is it Stockholm syndrome?
  - riversflow 4y ago
    I’ll bite, I think the defense is mostly to the status quo of the industry. The fact of the matter is these corporations have developed and tested medicines that drastically improve my parents (and many many elderly/retirement age folks) quality of life, and some of these medicines are pretty new. The system is currently working pretty good by the metric of pharmaceutical advances.
  - sershe 4y ago
    Because they mostly have a proven track record of advancing human well-being? As do other corporations from railroads to Amazon. Sure, they are not perfect, but the governments you advocate should kneecap them (to echo your other general comment) have a track record of ruining it, /especially/ when they try to decide what's "fair/unfair". You are defending a much larger, more powerful, vastly more evil and harmful entity.

dmitriid 4y ago

> Yes. The US makes up 42% of GLOBAL healthcare spend. A lot of that healthcare spend is wasted on administrative overhead of the US system. "U.S. insurers and providers spent $812 billion on administration, amounting to $2497 per capita (34.2% of national health expenditures) versus $551 per capita (17.0%) in Canada: $844 versus $146 on insurers' overhead; $933 versus $196 for hospital administration; $255 versus $123 for nursing home, home care, and hospice administration; and $465 versus $87 for physicians' insurance-related costs. Of the 3.2-percentage point increase in administration's share of U.S. health expenditures since 1999, 2.4 percentage points was due to growth in private insurers' overhead, mostly because of high overhead in their Medicare and Medicaid managed-care plans." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31905376/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31905376/