vlad321 said:
Viper1 said:
vlad321 said:
The problem is with the business part. Because the moment companies see you depend on them too much they will instantly try to milk you as much as possible. What will happen under the capitalistic model owuld be something along this way:
Company A invents cure for AIDS first. There are no other cures known, the company patents the cure. The demand is high and there are no other copmetitors so they start charging a ridiculous amount, oen which only the top 5% and less can afford to pay. Any following company will probably get sued, due to the patent filed earlier. How many ways do you think people can take care of AIDS?
See what happens? It's kind of how Time Warner tried goign the way of content based billing instead of speed based. Thankfully they got pressured from the government and people threatened to switch and they changed that. What happens if there were no other companies to switch to and the government did as what you said and just chilled in the back?
If it's a private business, it won't work. Unless like the red corss or some non-profit organization comes up with the cure.
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That's a rather dubious proposition though. You can't base a health care system on something like that.
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Well what I'm saying is to let the government pay the researchers and doctors to discover the cure. Maybe slightly inefficient (maybe if people in government were assigned by merit not favor done to the guy above) but it would still be better off for everyone than if a business did it. I'd rather pay the government than some person in a business, at least I control who I'm paying for a week every 4 years, not so with a business.
At least the politicians have a little more incentive than jsut money, they need to get re-elected, so they serve the people at least to a larger amount of a degree than a pure businessman.
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If only this were true.
Capitalism works because it is better at economic matters than any government ever dreamed it could be. However, we do have , plenty of government funded research so it's not like the cure for AIDS, or other breakthroughs, must come from a private corporation...much less must it be the US itself. Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and many more foreign pharmaceutical companies could be the one with the big breakthroughs.
