acptulsa
Member
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2008
- Messages
- 75,559
A drug costs 'practically nothing' in Canada but costs five thousand dollars in Minnesota?
Impossible without government intervention. There is no way in hell that works without government intervention at all. None.
In fact, no one charges five grand without not only government intervention, but socialized medicine. Nobody. The reason why is simple--you make more money making it affordable, because you get lots more customers. If the government is robbing everyone to pay your price, you can sell quite a bit at five K. But if it isn't, you have one percent as many customers at five grand as you have at five hundred, and there's no way you make less money selling one hundred times as much of your product.
See, your problem is that you're buying the media bull that capitalism in some way resembles the system we're running under right now. But what we have today is out of control corporatism. Capitalism is what we had ninety years ago, during the Roaring Twenties and the administration of the greatest president of the Twentieth Century, Calvin Coolidge. This corporate protectionism and corporate welfare we have now, this federal legal code that fills large rooms, this atmosphere of entrepreneurial fear that comes when any tiny business needs the same three lawyers and seven CPAs the big players have, this isn't capitalism. This isn't free enterprise. It isn't freedom at all.
Your problem is that you assume we don't have socialized medicine now, but that these current asinine prices are set by free enterprise. This is a position born of ignorance. Two things happened about fifty years ago that turned the whole industry into socialized medicine, whether everyone was benefitting or not. One was the federal law that required hospital emergency rooms to treat all comers, regardless of whether they had an emergency or not. Suddenly the most expensive-to-maintain doctors offices in all the land had to grow enough to handle whole flocks of people with head colds. And every hospital patient that could pay at all had to pay more or the hospital would go broke.
The other was medicare. The bureaucrats demanded reams of paperwork, and doctors have to pay office staff to handle that. For a time, that didn't have an effect on the prices other people paid. But then the legislature, in its infinite wisdom, decided doctors were screwing the public, and passed a law requiring that doctors charge medicare, with its reams of largely redundant or downright useless paperwork, the same rates they charge cash patients who require none of that extra labor and other expense. Presto! Now the doctors really were screwing the public, and being forced to by the federal government. This was the day that socialized medicine first began to look like something even slightly resembling a necessity for someone other than the old and the incurable. Suddenly the free market was out, and the possibility that medical care could be affordable was nearly done.
Oh, there are such things as clinics who refuse all medicare patients so they aren't forced by law to overcharge (criminally overcharge, by any standard of usury known to civilized mankind) cash patients. We have one here in town; my own mother lost her doctor to one of them. And the medical industrial complex is trying to figure out how to do away with those now; Obamacare alone is knocking them down like flies.
Now. Tell me how an industry which is forced by the government to overcharge cash customers for processing overwhelming amounts of paperwork they don't even require is capitalism at work. Please explain that to us. Tell us how it's freedom. Or better still, tell us how charging all of us for medical procedures down to and including sex change operations on children without the consent of their parents is a sustainable model for a health care system that doesn't drown the whole nation in debt. I dare you.
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