I'm pretty sure the pharma industry is already doing their very best to slow down innovation as much as possible. There is no profit to be made in effectively treating or even healing people. I don't see how they would be able to slow it down even further.

The exorbitant pricing and ineffective medicine in contrast to the gigantic profit margins of pharma companies tell pretty much the opposite story. Apparently there is already no competition driving innovation. The only thing they're driving is new ways to collect even more money and pay even more doctors.

Government funded research wouldn't work to the same degree unless they offered similarly competitive salaries for pharmacologists/biochemists like the private big pharma companies at which point the undertaking of drug development is just as capitally intensive ... 

Pharmaceutical research scientists have unbelievable bargaining power because of their indispensable skills in producing drug candidates ... 

The higher value future doesn't consist of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft or even Tencent but rather it will be Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novartis, AbbVie, and Gilead ... 

In the not too distant future the former will live in the past where their time ticking bombs will be entering the post silicon world. (many of the computer scientists and engineers will become obsolete and at that point we'll be seeing unions formed for those professions) As people age and nations keep getting more developed there will be more demand for spending specialty drugs that will lead to the latter's meteoric rise ... (the next hot thing will be biologics rather than as seen with consumer electronics for past decades) 

Making humanity a better race means that they need to also produce life enhancing drugs too (intelligence, strength, and other desirable abilities) rather than just life saving drugs ... (I can foretell that there is a massive market to eugenics in which big pharma will be a key instrument)

Its incredibly naive to think the public options is going to be at par with the private option. If that was the case, there wouldn't really be a reason for the private option to exist.

Our government already spends a fortune providing healthcare services to about 1/3 of the country with mixed results.

The wealthy already pay a vast majority of the taxes. For the most part, people want to keep their private options. If the government forces people to pay your hypothetical $1000 into the public option, many may not be able to afford the private option they prefer.

So yeah, some sort of public options existing as option is something many people would support. But don't be surprised if people oppose the government takeover of healthcare. Primarily because we have little faith in government to operate that.

democraps fucked up my healthcare, i had a $500 deductible before, after obamacare, it went to $4000 and up $1800 a year. yeah fuck the mandates, fuck obamacare. anything that has to be mandated is a fail. stay the fuck out of my wallet and paycheck.

Well, we have that setup in our country, kind of like the US model within education with public schools and charter schools (we also have charter schools).However, private alternatives would likely never be able to exist without government funding. 

Well, where I live it´s quite common with research in both the public and the private sector and the government buys the medicines to sell to citizens. Some medicine is quite expensive but we have a high-cost safety net where you nver pay more than approx. 265$ per year for medicine. And we still manage to have way lower expenses per capita for healthcare with a better healthcare outcome than the US. So there must be something about our model that just works =).

Unfortunately about half the population of the US enjoys being anally reamed by the high costs of private healthcare. Must be something in the water, or maybe they like the feeling of wasted spending.

Anyway, thankfully the Republican base is literally dying away and as long as Democrats can keep the corporatists from holding the reins to the party (they haven't managed it yet but who knows) then there may actually be a little bit of hope for the United States joining the rest of the world in the most fiscally efficient method of healthcare which will guarantee it to all US citizens like practically every other country in the world.

Do you know anyone that has cancer?

My dad is alive today solely because of a drug created in the 5 years. 

Do you really think nothing has happened since Polio was cured?

As someone who grew up near Mayo Clinic, I can tel you I saw a ton of times super rich famous, or even rulers of other countries fly in to get treatment from Mayo. Areas get blocked off, big secret service type vehicles and guys in suits waiting around areas for a few days. 

Why would some prince or something of a coutnry come all the way to Rochester, Minnesota (for that don't know, that's one of those flyover states) to get treatment if Europe has better healthcare? If they are so insanely wealthy and important that their very names are kept secret and they have secret service surrounding the buildings, could they not afford to go wherever they want or bring whoever they want to them? 

Or we've seen no proof to show that universal healthcare would be better for us financially.

Since the AIA, mine, and everyone I knows premiums have all gone up by at least 50% at the minimum.

Medicare and Medicaid suck and doctors and many hospitals even refuse patients who use them because their rate of payment is so shitty. 

Other areas that the government starts trying to help in pricing, just increases prices. Just look at the education. As soon as the government tried to help people pay for college, prices just increased exponentially. (don't bring up the few schools for profit. I'm not talking Trump University. I'm talking the public colleges that have been around for 50-100 years all of a sudden increasing in prices way more than they historically did each year, as soon as the government started guaranteeing kids money to pay fro school.)