Capitalism does not work in medicine...

[pbmus]

Last edited Thu Oct 26, 2017, 07:52 PM - Edit history (1)

Incentivizing medicine is what has led to the current opioid epidemic...ask any doctor how many points/rewards/kickbacks they get from pharma for writing scripts for opioids....

[democratisphere]

1. What would anyone expect from the most corrupt healthcare system in the world.

[unblock]

2. i'm not convinced that "capitalism" can't work in medicine,

but my definition of "capitalism" includes a health dose of regulation.

obviously, that's not the system we currently have in place in america.

many companies, certainly many pharmaceutical companies, have market pricing power, which is a big no-no in actual capitalism (again, not the system we currently have in place in america).

the 17-year patent time frame is of very questionable validity in medicine, and in any event, companies shouldn't be allowed to effectively pay generic makers *not* to produce competing medications, nor should additional 17-year patents be available to companies that modify another medication with a tiny, usually irrelevant tweak, just to get a "fresh" patent.

in any event, the system overall can't deny health care to all in need, even if indigent, nor can it be right to routinely bankrupt people for relatively routine ailments.

and in any event, insurance companies need incentives to handle claims more timely and more ethically. just plain denying and delaying and making patients and doctors just through hoops just to get the promised coverage is ridiculous.

[pbmus]

3. Sounds like you are leaning towards single payer..

Because regulations don’t work unless enforced...

Taking away incentives to push pills will stop opioid crisis...no regulation will do this in current capitalistic medicine...

[unblock]

4. single payer would certainly work better than what we have now,

though i'm more practical than ideological on this; i'd be happy with anything that actually works well for all of us.

i rather liked "hillarycare" from the 90's. it's painful to think how much better our world might be today had that actually passed back then.

[pbmus]

5. What could have been, can be, what can happen..

The answers are simple on the surface...

Incentivizing medicine leads to more pill scripts...do we agree?

[unblock]

6. absent effective counter-incentives or regulations, yes.

insurance companies do a good job of making it difficult to prescribe certain medications.

unfortunately, they do it pretty much solely based on price.

which means that they actually have tougher hoops for me to jump through to get triptans (expensive but non-narcotic migraine medications) than to get narcotics (which i only use when the triptans fail because i'm paranoid about getting addicted).

how stupid is that???