1. The US has worse outcomes compared to other countries with nationalized healthcare systems and spends way, way more. I'm shocked you're even debating this. There's no shortage of evidence.
2. Medication prices in the US are higher than anywhere else in the world by a wide margin. There is also no shortage of evidence. You seem to use
denial as your main defense mechanism (which is considered one of the lowest levels of defense mechanisms). There's not much that can be said to a denier.
3. You think having no laws would allow companies to start caring about other stakeholders and not just profit? We allow companies to patent medications for a reason. That's a good idea and provides an incentive for innovation and research. Allowing them to divvy up the market to allow monopolies and price-fixing for medications that have already gone generic is not a good idea.
4. I am aware that a non-profit organization still seeks to make money and that there are still issues with the non-profit system. It is still better than the corporate, publicly-traded nonsense that seeks to extort money out of employees and customers combined with aggressive accounting practices to pay off shareholders in the short term while ignoring everything else that matters. Go on Glassdoor and compare the company ratings of some for-profit and some non-profit companies and you will see a significant difference. A non-profit theoretically serves stakeholders, a for-profit serves only shareholders.
If we can't even agree that the United States
spends more money and
has worse outcomes (the fundamental issue) then there's not much more to be said.
For Christ's sake, life expectancy in the US has
started to decline over the past 3 years according to the CDC mainly due to an increase in suicides, alcohol and drug overdoses in young adults. What do you get when you screw over the next generation by extorting all their money in order to pay for basic education, housing and healthcare (all incredibly bloated) on top of handing them a bankrupt social security system and $23 trillion in debt? Plus an economic system designed to funnel individuals into a toilet bowl of depression working themselves to death for horrible companies to make the wealthy money in the stock market By basic measures, there is
more wealth inequality now than there was during the guilded age. It is
insane that three individuals in the US have as much money as the bottoms 50%. Most of the country struggles to survive working to make the country function while the investor class cracks the whip complaining about having to pay their employees. Economies don't flourish with massive amounts of wealth inequality spurred on by asset inflation. Just ask investors from the 1920's. If the average person doesn't have money, the average person can't
sustainably buy things in the economy which is what actual economic growth is--not this asset inflation spurred on by exponential investment into housing and stocks that no one can actually afford. High drug prices resulting from "free market" monopolization and price-fixing is just one factor contributing to this broader issue. And when you get down to it, it all stems from the fact that the world stopped caring about everything other than "growth" and pandering to corporate interests. It turns out "growth" is a horrible measure of societal advancement. The United States was supposed to have been founded with the goal of the "pusuit of happiness," not the pursuit of corporate profit. Destroy nonrenewable resources? Who cares as long as we make a profit. 80% of people hate their jobs and their mental health is suffering as a result? Who cares as long as we're profiting off it. There will be a significant crash/depression at the end of this. It's just a question of how long all this nonsense can go on with the Fed pouring gasoline on the fire until the house burns down. The direction the world is heading in is sadly not sustainable.
This is my last post on the topic. I'll be bumping this thread in however many years it takes down the road before all of this becomes apparent and it's written in the history books.
www.nbcnews.com
