waauw wrote:I got a question. Does Obama go to the big farmaceutical companies and to the hospitals to force them to lower their prices? Because this is something very important if you wanna install a system similar to the european health care system. If you don't do this when having an extensive health care system, it'll be like throwing a free party of taxpayer income to those big businesses.
Sort of. There are provisions that allow some negotiation, but our system has an entirely different basis.
A big issue is research.
A lot of US medical research is government funded, FAR more than a lot of people realize. This generally falls under the "health and welfare" clause, and also the old "get it done" mentality, particularly in the 50's and 60's, but carried forward in a distorted fashion.
Most people are fully in support of research that might cure diabetes, cancer, birth defects, etc., or have been up until very recently. So the idea of the government funding all that was never terribly objectionable. However, all government data and research is public. Not necessarily in its "raw", uncensored form, particularly when it came to medical research and personal data. (but also in any kind of raw research, not so much to protect privacy, but because raw data needs to be put into context to be understood -- you have to know not just the data, but how it was taken, why and exactly what parameters were set, etc.). Anyway, medical research was deemed "too important" to "just keep". It needed to be "used", was the idea, so the government was mandated to give the research away to the company that was doing the closest kind of work. It is that company and not the US government, then that gets the patent and that then can sell the product or information as its own. NO credit need ever be given to the taxpayers who funded the research through the government.
All of this has resulted in a lot of wonderful advances and achievements, but it has also created very, very heavily skewed system. Taxpayers pay for the research. The research is available because of all the money they put forward, but then the taxpayers get billed for the actual use of the research at a very high rate. The government very much favors specific companies who then are able to have a huge edge. Moreover, they get to keep their patents, no matter who funded the research initially.
We wind up paying over and over for the same stuff. Worse, we buy healthcare insurance that also must make a profit. To make that profit, the companies use all sorts of complex formula that really just mean they will insure the healthy and do whatever they can to drop the rest. That last part is the only part that has changed under Obamacare. Even in that, it does look as though it might actually stem the cost increases to a point, but the irony is that the attack is not "we did not go far enough, we need to restart and do a good job", its"Obamacare is failing". Its failing because it was designed to profit big business and not the American people.
