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Wednesday, June 03, 2015

Rationing healthcare. Would you rather single-payer rational choice and government-supplier drug price negotiations, or do you prefer trusting the privateers? And if the latter, why in the world would you do that?

Privateers ration. It is that simple and anyone who says otherwise lies. E.g., this link.

Yes, at some point somebody is going to have to make a cost-benefit cutoff or else the provider medical-industrial complex will bleed the public for all they can get, Big Pharma in particular.

So, who represents the best balance in the public interest? The public, or the privateers who have been mismanaging things up to now and who are the biggest problem so far in the politics of gutting any true and actual reform toward single payer,(as most of the remainder of the advanced civilized world enjoys)?

Go figure. But do not overlook the one simple fact - the privateers ration - and they suck administrative fees and profit, whereas single payer would lessen overall costs by eliminating obscene profits as one of the present major costs.

That is pure and simple truth.

Face it.

UPDATE: Particularly galling, those in Congress lobbied successfully, by whatever means we may not know of, who impede government negotiation over pharmaceutical prices. Why should our citizens pay to subsidize treatements in India? The Strib item noted:

Gilead has reached contracts with companies to provide a comparable version of Harvoni in India for less than $1,000 for an entire course.

Compare that to a thousand bucks a pill, over weeks, vs a grand for the package. Who's getting screwed, and who in the privateer sector is doing the screwing, and who in Congress is fostering the screwing on a continuing basis? If you do not ask, you will never know.