Sunday, August 16, 2009

New Drugs Save Lives: Killing Big Pharma Would Kill Patients - NOT Greedy Capitalists

Considering the increasingly inane blogging over there, I'm tempted to say that the dorks at Lawyer, Guns and Money must be swamped with back-to-school prep. The only problem is that these guys don't prep! Well, at least not Robert Farley, who likes to glance at book manuscripts while dribbling a few whiskey sours down his mug and then calling that a "book review."

Well, "Scholarly" Scott Lemieux's not much better, considering his recent post, "Points About the Indefensible American Health Care System That Need To Be Made More Often." And what are those point?

Fun fact the media never tells you: as a % of GDP, the US has greater public expenditures on health care than the UK does. Not total expenditures, we know that. Public expenditures. More big government health care in the US than the UK.

And then Little Scotty adds this flourish of demonization:

And even the grossly underfunded British system doesn't seem to produce demonstrably worse results than the American one with it extra-expensive layer of corporate looting.

Hey, that's it! Corporate looting! Get rid of that and we'll be home free!

Wrong. New drugs save lives.

Check out The Astute Bloggers for a smart corrective to these statist authoritarians, "BASIC FALLACIES AND LIES OF THE LIBERAL ARGUMENT THAT USA HEALTHCARE IS WORSE THAN EUROPE'S":

Liberals are essentially arguing that we spend more because a lot goes into the pockets of insurers and not to doctors and nurses or actual care.

This is a lie ....

And pharma companies spend BILLIONS developing a SINGLE drug and many do not pass muster. To pay for the research which leads to life-saving and life-extending medicine, they need a high return on the drugs which do pass muster.

Killing Big Pharma would NOT kill greedy capitalists; it would be committing GENOCIDE against people who need new drugs to be developed.

We do spend more because of the GREED OF LAWYERS: we have a runaway tort system which allows lawyers to get billions each year from lawsuits against our healthcare system operators. Defensive medicine is extra expensive.

If we reined in the lawyers we'd save BILLIONS - ENOUGH TO INSURE ALMOST EVERYONE WHO WANTS INSURANCE BUT CAN'T AFFORD IT WITH VOUCHERS!
Check out more good stuff from The Astute Bloggers!

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