costs of medicine

[Guest guest]

China, japan, most of europe and korea all have socialized medicine.

So while the governments still have to buy drugs and pay doctors, the

medical systems have better cost controls than the free market. Most

of the expense of new technology is profit. The socialist governments

are able to prevent excessive profiteering due to their collective

bargaining clout (that why canadian drugs are cheaper). However, they

also tend not to embrace costly therapies that have little longterm

benefit. It is well known that most healthcare cost are incurred in

the last year of life. And socialist countries are often criticized

for not spending their entire budgets to make available every expensive

procedure on demand just to squeeze a few more week from life. If

these countries do embrace stem cell therapy in the context of their

existing social safety nets, then it will be because the longterm gains

will outweigh any costs. If you could avoid spending hundreds of

thousands of dollars by getting a regular stem cell injection, even for

a few thousand bucks a pop, it would be a net social gain.

 

But the hidden variable is that dramatic advances in technology always

result in decreasing costs and increasing salaries over the longterm

(though there is often some social adjustment period). We have seen

rapidly increasing healthcare costs in the US in recent years largely

due to the use of new and unnecessary drugs and the increased ability

to extend life. However earlier and significant technological advances

like modern water treatment and waste disposal dramatically decreased

healthcare costs. European and Asian countries are not wasting their

resources in this way. With a paradigm shift towards correcting the

root, the main advances of technology will no longer be in the realm of

expensive end of life care. I suppose this might result in shifting

costs here in the US where healthcare is not perceived as a basic

right. But since the new therapies will be relatively cheap to deliver

(compared to brain surgery, for example), it is likely that the

socialist countries will make these therapies widely available to their

citizens at cost no greater than their current budgets, but with much

greater rewards. The same is true of nanomedicine. There will always

be ways for corporations to suck your money away, but most of the world

has already decided that healthcare is not one of them. So let's not

project the backwards mentality of the US onto the world stage.

 

 

 

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