General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: My wife will get her meds [View all]theboss
(10,491 posts)How do we pay for all this shit?
Having actually seen the invoices for countless medical products, I can tell you that a lot of the stuff that we now consider essential (put in many cases did not exist 25 years ago), is really really really really really really expensive.
It goes without saying that a purely capitalistic model of you buy what you can afford is utterly immoral.
But, on the other end of the spectrum, you can't eliminate scarcity. You can't make everything available at no cost for everyone.
I tend to shudder when someone says, "No one should be denied any of this......." because I know - fundamentally - that everyone having access to everything is an impossibility. It simply is. There aren't enough healthcare professionals on earth and if there were, there is not enough money.
I'll give you a practical example from own career: Silver bandages. Every healthcare provider in the universe right now is scared out of their minds over antibiotic resistant bacteria. Practically every hospital has had a crisis of some kind regarding either MRSA or C-dif or some other nasty hospital-acquired infection that is a nightmare to treat.
There are ways to greatly limit these problems, but they are incredibly expensive.
One of the products that is great is Silver bandages. So...shouldn't we use these all the time? Yes...if you a) don't mind paying $33 for a Band-Aid and b) don't mind not having silver in 100 years. So...we...wait for it...ration the bandages. Use them only in certain cases in certain patient populations. Kind of like a...wait for it...formulary.
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