US Medicare For All Bill as good as dead now?

[Puppyroach]

fatslob-:O said:

Puppyroach said:

It´s a government funded safety net that means the government covers cost above that amount, which in turn is funded by all citizens through the universal healthcare system. And you are looking at this matter from a faulty perspective since there is nothing that says R&D needs to be as expensive if you ave a proper right-off period for its benefits.

The second part you will need to prove with some facts because it just sounds made up =).

We have independent research companies. For example, Astra was founded in Sweden and later marged with Zenica to form Astrazenice, one of the world largest pharmaceutical companies. 

When it comes to contributions within the field, you need to look at several key factors.

- One is publications: https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?area=2700&year=2017. In this area the US contributes with about 16 times more citations, yet the US is about 30 times as big as a country.

- You can also look at the global innovation index: https://www.globalinnovationindex.org/analysis-indicator where we rank fifth in the world in R&D (this is within all areas though).

- We are also fourth in the world in terms of spending on research and development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_research_and_development_spending.

If you want a specific example of medical innovations, well the Pacemaker is a Swedish invention.

The mistake many on your side of the argument makes though, is that you don´t argue around the fact that we should look at life expectancy, not the number of innovations. If the US is such a succesful country in the medical field, why are they aranked 31 in the world? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

Isn't Astrazeneca a british private big pharma company though ?  

Sure R&D doesn't need to be expensive if you're only looking to break even but isn't it a smarter idea to keep the profits so that you can build your next generation drug candidates and keep doing that perpetually and so forth instead constantly bankrupting every biotechnology startup ? Does the latter somehow not seem dysfunctional to you in the slightest ? Besides R&D for drug candidates keeps doubling every decade ... (I fear it's getting prohibitively expensive to innovate new drugs since Gilead just had to fork over 10 billion dollars to get production rights for a single molecule) 

Citations aren't everything. China is 3rd in terms of # of citations but their data is mostly garbage and they mostly don't bring drug candidates for the most part so far ... 

Using life expectancy as a measure of success is not a very useful comparison point. Japan decimates just about every western liberal democracies in terms of life expectancy at a portion of the price compared to all OECD nations but would any sane physician say that Japan is somehow delivering higher quality of care than their western counterparts ? Singapore has the 3rd highest life expectancy yet it doesn't have a single payer healthcare system but it also destroys just about every nation in value for only spending a fraction of their healthcare costs compared to everyone else. At that point instead of the question being framed as to why the US spends so much per capita on a worse healthcare outcome the same question can be raised about why European countries are spending more on healthcare yet have worse outcomes than Singapore ? 

Again life expectancy doesn't actually tell you anything about the quality of the healthcare delivered. "What happens if you remove deaths from fatal injuries from the life expectancy tables? Among the 29 members of the OECD, the U.S. vaults from 19th place to…you guessed it…first. Japan, on the same adjustment, drops from first to ninth."

Well that was convenient, remove life expectancy as a factor in order to reach first place 😊. And publications as well a citations are the usual measurements with which you estimate the success within a field.