Our current
system of medical development produces an insatiable drive to recoup costs in
private medical development. For
example, it would cost more to treat all Hepatitis patients with the latest
drug than we spend in toto on all prescription drugs in a year! This in turn drives up insurance costs for
everyone, due to the need to spread risk out to protect insurer’s profits.
This
conclusively shows that Nationalized Medical Research is even more important in
a private healthcare system than in a public one, as without it cost control
will prove elusive. More importantly, we
need action on maladies that pose a particular threat to society, not those
that sell well. How much is spent on new
diet pills, for example? Compare this to
the stunning lack of progress on ebola vaccines and treatments over the past
thirty-five years- a vaccine that worked on monkeys in government trials could
not get corporate sponsorship for human trials.
That was four years ago. It’s
hard to make private investors believe there is profit in treating a disease
which most commonly strikes those who are unable to pay. But Ebola does pose something of a long-term
threat, even to affluent societies. If
and when it spreads, it may be too late to develop treatments due to the myopia
of the private sector.
Our private
sector will spend only to serve for those who are able to pay- those looking
for cosmetic surgeries and medications.
This is not a sustainable foundation for medical research. We know our government can sponsor and
conduct research just fine- look at our military R/D budget. Actually, we already do much of our research that
way- 28 billion per year from the NIH on treatment development, a third of our
national total. This needs to be
increased. I am troubled by the use of
finite resources to treat less serious illnesses, but the lack of research for
serious ones is the greater problem.
Like most
things, this could be fixed with a fraction of the Pentagon’s floor wax budget. Hopefully, with enough public investment, a
lot of crises could be averted, and the private sector that depends on
mismanagement of life-saving attention and research could just wither away.
Solidarität, Genossinnen und Genossen
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