Nilatai wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Nilatai wrote:
Does your healthcare insurance pay directly for drug research?
Why is this a relevant question? I honestly have no clue what point you're trying to make here.
This is your whole argument. You insist that because you pay your health insurance to a private company instead of the state that there is more R&D in your country.
No. I didn't say this. I didn't say anything remotely close to this. I said that health care is a bad example because the US health care system isn't a great example of a free market system in the first place. *YOU* insisted that we only discuss the relative results of our health care systems, despite this. Then YOU insisted that I list off something that the US health care system does better than the UK. I responded by saying that the US system focuses more on R&D and less on direct treatment and care. I never said
anything about how the US system was funded.
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So I'm asking you, how much of your insurance money goes towards drug R&D?
And I'll say again: It doesn't matter. Tell you what though, I'll bring this obsession you have with only counting the dollars people in the US pay to health insurance companies up the next time someone attempts to use the "total cost of health care" as a comparison, usually when they're attempting to show that the US spends more on its health care system per patient than the UK does (or some other country with socialized health care). Hell, it'll probably be you who does it?
You do get that the total cost of health care in the US includes every dollar spent by public or private entities on anything in the health field, right? That the R&D money doesn't come from my health insurance payment is somewhat irrelevant.
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See, if your answer is "nothing", then you have to accept my point about R&D money coming from Pharmaceutical companies. And as neither of our healthcare systems pay for prescription medications(although in my country it is supplemented), I can only say that the reason there is more R&D in your country is because big pharma makes more profit. This will have more to do with their mark ups on products than the healthcare system itself.
Now you may accept my healthcare is superior but your big pharma is better at turning a profit.
Um... Ok. As long as you admit that turning a bigger profit results in more R&D and better/faster production of new drugs/treatments/whatever? Given that my position is about the free market parts being "better" than the publicly managed/funded parts, that's a 'win' for me, isn't it?
But back to the whole "we're not arguing a good case" bit, the AVM example I gave had nothing to do with development of drugs, but with development of treatments (didn't I already explain this?). And a good chunk of that R&D was from government funding as well (can't say for sure how much of the funding Standford used for that specific research came from public versus private sources). My argument in this case wasn't really about socialist versus free market (how many times do I have to say that health care is a bad case for this?), but about the choice of different systems to focus on research versus focusing on direct treatment and care.
Even the "socialist" parts of the US health care system tends to focus more on R&D than treatment. There's a reason for that, and we can discuss that if you want, but can you at least acknowledge that this is true? Has nothing to do with the direct argument I was originally making, but if you're going to insist on arguing about health care, I'm going to point out the inherent problems with over focusing just on direct care.
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Now, what's your argument against universal healthcare, again?
Same argument I've made about subsidizing alternative energy products. I'm all for the government getting involved in paying for research for new/better things. I'm not so much for the government paying for the end product though. And the same reasons exist for both. When the government is paying for the end product it will over time end out discouraging new/better products since it has to pay to implement them. Those which reduce costs will be implemented, but those which are better, but perhaps cost more (or even the same) will tend to be resisted.
And at the risk of attempting to direct this topic back to *my* original point, I've seen this first hand in the tech market, where nations with state operated (or heavily subsidized) telecomm industries resisted new/better technology (significantly better in this case) purely because they'd already adopted a standard and it would cost them money to change. Private companies see new/better as a means to generate more profit for themselves and will fight each other to implement new things. Governments very consistently will fight against them since they don't have the same profit motive. This gets even worse when there are ugly private/public partnerships involved. In that case, profit motive becomes counterproductive in terms of new product development and implementation and it becomes all about winning the governments favor.
My position is not strictly about health care. I've repeatedly tried to explain this to you. Health care is a poor case to examine because it's one of the most socialized industries in the US already. We focus our money differently, but it's not really a "free market". Not even the health insurance and direct care parts. I'm honestly confused why you keep focusing on this one industry.
This is your whole argument. You insist that because you pay your health insurance to a private company instead of the state that there is more R&D in your country. So I'm asking you, how much of your insurance money goes towards drug R&D? 
