[ymu]

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I can't see how any sane person could argue that it makes more sense to pay $4,500/year on average for healthcare instead of $1,500/year on average extra tax. You like the idea of being sold expensive snake oil by largely unregulated salesmen? The first bank run for decades - something previously thought impossible in today's economic system - has just happened because of irresponsible lending to US consumers, and US consumers still want less regulation?

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In your system who do you suppose would do research to find new medicines. I hate repeating something that was said earlier in the thread, but I just can't believe that someone can be this oblivious to what drives research and development.

[/ QUOTE ]Firstly, I haven't advocated nationalising them. I've suggested that they shouldn't be allowed to sell obscenely expensive and largely useless poisons to an unsuspecting public.

Secondly, I'm advocating sane collective purchasing of health care instead of allowing a bunch of insurance companies in to take a massive cut of the money spent. Drug costs are also only a small proportion of spending on health, cutting them in half often doesn't make a substantial impact on the output of economic models. The US system also provides perverse incentives to doctors to over-treat, sometimes leading to worse health outcomes as a result. High dose chemotherapy for breast cancer is a good example - it took years to prove that it was shortening lives because doctors, mostly in the US, were such vociferous advocates of it. No drug company made money out of that, but the doctors did.

Finally, your faith in the fundamental goodness of a multi-billion dollar industry is touching, but what do you think the universities and public sector research bodies do? We don't need a bazillion me too drugs and armies of reps swamping medics with misleading information and billions wasted on advertising. Public sector medical research is far more valuable and a lot cheaper. The major medical journals won't even publish industry funded "research" any more unless the authors had certain contractual arrangements in place to safeguard the scientific integrity (rare to date). It's ridiculous to suggest that they don't lie, cheat and put peoples' lives at risk because they demonstrably do. That's why most countries are putting better systems in place to catch them at it and examine the true value of treatments instead of relying on information the companies stick on the advertising leaflets.