I'm aware that you said "either" which is why I edited that into my post on certain sections (seemingly after you clicked "Reply") in case you would suggest I wasn't aware of that. I specifically said: You said "every country on that list" (either pays for healthcare directly through foreign aid, or something something something NATO, etc)
When I'm talking about "all the countries on the list" reliant on foreign aid, I'm referring to all the ones you were referencing. Because you were (originally) ambiguous about who they were, to say the least. 

You're unsure how I missed something you seemingly edited into your post c.a. 30 minutes later (according to the edit timestamp)?
It was because I had already clicked on Quote and begun typing up my response before that, and that link was definitely not part of the post I replied to.

Yes, my list shows the top 25 countries. It stands to reason that if they're not on that list then whatever foreign aid they may have received is probably not going to be enough to cover their their medical expenses. Especially if those countries themselves are top donors in foreign aid. Although Israel is indeed on that list, which is worth noting. I'll correct my previous statement to reflect that.

Regarding the list of countries you mentioned, Israel, Chile, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Turkey, the planned foreign aid for those countries is as follows:

Israel: 3,1 Billion
Chile: 500k
Poland: 1,5m
Hungary: 800k
Slovenia: 550k
Turkey: 3,8m

Aside from maybe Israel, none of those figures seemingly come even close to being able to fund their healthcare in a fiscal year. For comparison, Poland's GDP is 469 Billion USD. While they're supposed to receive 1,5m in foreign aid.
And Israel isn't exactly a region of stability and peace. Luckily the site you provided allows us to break down what this foreign aid is for. When clicking on "Peace and Security" Israel is of course still highlighted. So is Poland, Slovenia, Chile, Hungary and Turkey.

But what happens when we click on "Health"?
None of those countries are highlighted any more.
What about "Education and Social Services"?
None of those countries are highlighted any more.
What about "Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance"?
None of those countries are highlighted any more. Etc.



Basically, all those planned funds seem to be going towards Peace and Security for those particular nations. (Not social security, but counter-terrorism, stabilization operations, etc.)
None of them seem dependent on foreign aid for their healthcare programs. Especially not based on the sums they are getting.
Since the vast majority of countries with UHC were also among the worlds top donors, the amount of them who could even potentially be relying on foreign aid in the first place (let alone to to fund their healthcare programs) were so small that referring to them only as "everyone on the list" in the same breath as the rest of what you said, came off as a grave exaggeration, or misunderstanding from your part. 

I don't know how you got "government donations are better and more noble" from my post when I even said that "they shouldn't have to offset corporate greed or failings of the government (to act in the best interest of the people)." In other words, it's more noble of individuals to willingly donate their own money for such causes, even if they have no comparable incentive of doing so such as listening to the will of the majority so that they can keep their governing positions in the next election.
As for "better" that's very subjective. Like I said, I don't think individuals should need to donate obscene amounts of money just to ensure that we have access to our basic human rights. If the government listens to what most people want to do with out tax money, they can achieve that.
Relying on private donations is also extremely inconsistent, because what one person wants to donate to varies from someone else.

And you thought I was suggesting that "there is no greed in government"? No, in fact I think there's too much greed in government. Especially when they act on behalf of their donors rather than their constituents, as I mentioned.
We were however, this whole time talking about government spending, because that's what this topic was about. And for a good reason. There's no plausible scenario where no one is too poor to be alive, by relying on private donations. The only consistent way to accomplish that is to channel our collective tax money.

For other charity causes, private donations are very important though. But that just wasn't the subject at hand. You're the one who even brought up foreign aid in the first place, but in regards to supposedly funding universal healthcare. Which is a government funded program.

The rest of the world's prices seem to be in line with the norm. Their own EU/Asia developed drugs and equipment cost about the same. And large pharmaceutical companies are still highly profitable in those regions. The ones in the US are just taking it too far.
Remember the CEO of that one drug company, Martin Shkreli, who raised the cost of HIV treatment pills from $13.50 to $750 per pill? (They cost a few cents to manufacture.) 
He didn't need to set the price even remotely close to that. He raised it by 5000%. But he did because he could. In the end, he went to jail. But not because of that. Sadly that was legal. He went to jail because he scammed rich people in the process.
That's the kind of thing that's going on in the US with other pharmaceutical companies, just at a less extreme rate. They're not raising prices because they have to, but because they can. Costs for healthcare were not always this high in the US, but they've been steadily climbing over the years.

As for buying pharmaceuticals from other countries, in some cases you'd be buying back drugs that you manufactured yourself and exported to that country. Pretty ridiculous, don't you think?

Ideology (that humans living in a society have a right to live...) does not help my argument, but your ideology of sacrificing 45 000+ people a year who didn't need to die, because that may approve a hypothetical useful drug sooner, helps your argument?

You're favoring sacrificing 45 000+ people in a real scenario, in favor of a very hypothetical scenario where this speeds up the approving of future drugs that would somehow end up saving more lives than this system unnecessarily killed?

First of all, keep in mind that most of these newly discovered drugs are not designed to save lives. Usually they are improvements of more common non life threatening drug treatments. In more rare cases they are improvements to drugs designed to save lives. And in even rarer cases, it's a new drug designed to treat a previously un-treatable condition. And in even rarer cases, those conditions are life threatening. Etc.

Just keep that in mind as we go on when you chose your priorities that lead to 45 000+ people a year actually dying.
The most common conditions that lead to premature death today globally will likely remain at the top of the charts for many decades to come. If not centuries.

Now there are three major key factors that the article you linked to doesn't bring up.

1.) The study they cited about the average cost of new drug approvals was heavily criticized by a nummber of industry peers, including Doctors Without Borders, which said it was "unreliable because the industry's research and development spending is not made public". (This is a very important fact that I'll get back to below.) Another publication said it "contains a lot of assumptions that tend to favor the pharmaceutical industry."
Coincidentally (?) the source of that 2014 study in your article can no longer be found: https://csdd.tufts.edu/news/complete_story/pr_tufts_csdd_2014_cost_study
At least every reference link I found lead to that broken link page.
I don't know if they retracted the study due to criticism of lack of evidence, but in either case it leads me into my next point:

2.) At no point in the article you linked does it mention that the primary reason for why US drug prices are so high is because USA, unlike any other modern country on the planet, is unable to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical companies. It briefly mentions higher costs being a factor, alongside the cases where its newer drugs, but makes no effort trying to explain why the drugs cost so much more in the US when in the cases where it's not a newer drug.
You can find the same US manufactured drug in Canada for up to 5 times cheaper. Manufactured by a US company....
It's literally cheaper in some cases to drive to Canada to buy drugs that were exported from USA, rather than buying domestically.

And the most important part...

3.) Even assuming that the numbers in your article are correct, a key factor they did not divulge is that industry's research and development spending is not made public. In other words, there's no proven correlation between the pharmaceutical industry jacking up prices in the US to them investing the gains into more research and development, rather than pocketing the gains and buying their CEO's their 10th yacht.
The only example this article uses to establish such a concept is a study in regards to the Orphan Drug Act. And here, they did not mention that the Orphan Drug Act established tax incentives for rare disease drug development.

The bottom line is, these kind of tax incentives for rare drug development can be given without jacking up drug prices to multiple times that of what they cost in other countries. And we don't know how much of those extra gains the pharmaceutical industry puts back into R&D because R&D spending is not made public.

The reason that this article seems to conveniently not disclose any of this info may very well be that it was funded by the pharmaceutical industry.

But even if that's not the case, and even if jacked up US drug prices meant a substantial increase in R&D, it does not mean we need to sacrifice 45 000+ people a year for something that very well may not save more lives than it took. Especially not when the majority of people, even in the USA where brainwashing about this subject is high ("we will turn into Soviet Russia or Venezuela if we allow this one more socialistic program, on top of roads, bridges, fire department, parks, libraries, elementary school, elected officials", etc) the majority of people want a single payer system according to polls.

Have you EVER considered that it's you and the others here that are mistaken ? If "drug access" is so vital then just where hell are the the pharmaceutical state owned enterprises to compete in the market to prove private enterprises wrong about the expenses drug development ? I can already tell you and the other promoters of this system won't answer to that question cause it doesn't exist. I'm waiting for your so called perverted system to "nationalize" a private entity to prove your point and see how that goes ... 

I thing many on your "side" of this matter seem to think that we who are in favor of universal healthcare see private entities as being harmful to the industry. They can exist as much as they want, but will then compete with stateowned entities. I am not a bif fan of price control but having a stateowned entity will bring competition that forces others to lower their prices in order to compete. For example, we have a government run pharmacy that competes with private entities on the pharmaceutical market. When Swden privatized large parts of the pharmaceutical market, prices generally increased though wich means that I as a customer paid quite a lot more for medicine than before when the government had monopoly on the market. I am still in favor of privatizing the market, but it is important to have public options aswell.

And this will not hinder medical research. As someone else pointed out, 11 out of the 20 largest pharmaceutical companies are not american so obviously innovation continues in a country where the government runs the healthcare industry. America is a great contributor, but they have a tendency to over-inflate their own importance in this field. If they weren´t as big, other countries would likely fill the void, simply because medical research is ne of the most fundamental parts of our society.

Finally! Some real dialogue here! Thank the lord even though I'm an agnostic atheist ... (should tell anybody how desperate I am to look for open ended discussion) 

Sorry if I did generalize about "your side" viewing private health entities as generally being harmful and yes the price of medicine (particularly some of the new and lead edge patented ones) are not ideal and I guess America could work to improve that by introducing a 2 tiered system to medicaid (medicare for all is nothing more than a distant dream) to improve coverage such as providing visits to only to general practitioners, only being able to use unpatented generics along with deciding whether to apply deductibles to other health services or not depending on the cost which means that Americans would now have a 3 tiered health system and I too realize the value in providing more cover or higher access but we have to stop spooking the truly hardline experts in medicine so much to be able to keep their talent so that they can afford to teach prospective medical students to pass the talent around to make highly specialized or personalized care more accessible in the future ... 

We also need to learn to respect all sorts of intellectual properties. If the majority of us here respect the concept of copyright then it should not be so foreign to accept the of having a mini monopoly on drugs through patents ... (pharmaceutical companies often only have around 10 years to potentially profit off of it's development sometimes maybe even less once a patent expires and generics come into pricture) 

Most of the pharmaceutical state owned enterprises don't sound at all like their competitors to global giants such as Johnson & Johnson, Roche, Pfizer or Novartis so I get the impression most of the time that national health care providers with a single payer system in these countries just use collective bargaining (price control in it's purest form) against these giants to pay for medicine in bulk at reduced rates but America is swept under the rug in the process bearing the brunt (70% profit = America) of producing these leading edge treatments ... 

Price controls hinders medical research and drug supply in practically any case and just because 11 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies are located outside the US does not mean that most of the drugs are not initially and majorly developed inside the US either. There's a reason why lot's of foreign firms out there make acquisitions or partner with American firms to either gain access to the market or the facilities. FDA is noticeably quicker than the EMA to approve drugs too so leading edge drugs like Kymriah are still the bread and butter of the US market despite having some of it's development from the outside ... (many smaller companies like Spark Therapeutics being an extremely promising American startup that's only five years old benefit too by already getting FDA approval for it's cure to a progressive blindness disease)

I genuinely believe if everybody could just invest more (and not just leave it to America) that we could soon have a hard cure to many life afflicting and chronic conditions such as from common cancers, to HIV or diabetes ... 

A potential way we could get more direct funding to the R&D operation itself is if we just have the government shopping around for whichever entities (whether private or state owned) to secure the licensing and production rights instead but it does beg the question if any governments are willing to pay to pioneer access to treating rare diseases or conditions ? 

They do spend some money on their own military, if they're allowed to have one. USA's protection is not the only factor though. NATO is obligated to defend any of it's members from attack. That's why we haven't had a war break out in Europe (Among EU & NATO countries) since NATO was established after World War 2.
USA is the biggest deterrent for Russia though. But USA can certainly cut some of it's insane defense spending, and still have a higher annual defense budget than the closest 4 countries combined, and still be able to protect a NATO nation.

Also, that $610 Billion is apparently going to be $717 Billion this year. Fantastic...
As for "paying the same for worse care", can you elaborate on that? Why would you get worse care? The idea is that the funds would be more efficiently spent on the hospitals and patients, rather than focusing on corporate profit. Which is an issue when USA is the only country on the list where the government isn't allowed to negotiate for drug prices with the pharmaceutical companies. Which is why your prices have skyrocketed, and you can buy the same US manufactured drug for up to 3-5 times cheaper, in Canada.

And just for clarification, the World Health Organization doesn't even rank USA's healthcare among the top 25 in the world: http://thepatientfactor.com/canadian-health-care-information/world-health-organizations-ranking-of-the-worlds-health-systems/
Although that was in the year 2000, but I heard they're ranked 36'th today. Which is one rank higher than their 2000 placing.

No I don't think I am, Swedish neutrality.

Industry executives complaining that their prices, meaning what they are allowed to charge due to pricing controls, dropped by a mere single digit percentage. You don't think they are jumping at the chance to gouge US customers if they are complaining about that? 

NATO defense spending is measured as a percentage of GDP. It's supposed to be 2% and nearly all of the NATO countries fall incredibly short of that. The US will never not be far out ahead in pure numbers unless the US economy collapses. Shutting down defense spending is synonymous with closing down bases and retracting the size of the military by recalling the hundreds of thousands of soldiers stationed abroad.

As far as paying the same for worse care, there isn't really any service that has been taken over by the government and had a positive impact in final product. The quality of service or product always gets worse. I have no reason to believe that the service would improve or even stay the same. The price of drugs or cost of the service doesn't impact the quality of the service. Hence the, pay the same for worse service.

As far as the WHO, they rank (appropriately) the overall mean of healthcare available in the US. The quality of care varies so much from city to city, not even to mention the jumps that can take place from state to state. The very best hospitals in the world are in the US, but that is a byproduct of the higher costs. The level of care that a very poor person receives (although free or nearly through Medicaid) is not near the level of care that someone who can afford the best receives.

At least in my country there are numerous examples of services and products that have dropped in quality after they have been privatised. If a company wants to make profit from health care, it might not have much motives to cure people in the long run, while a goverment might/should have the motive to take as good care as they can to minimize expenses (if its free/almost free for the citizens). If the motive is to make people healthy (to save money) instead of making money from the sickness, then the service can also be better. Of course anything can be done well or like shit. Personally I view health care, education, police, fire department and such, as things that should be at least mostly handled by the goverment/state etc