patrick.net

How can you support corporate health care, when corporations have screwed up so much?

That is a good question Larry. Healthcare is different than the finance/banking/real estate industries in an important way. When the banks were taking on huge risks that would lead to their downfall virtually no citizens knew it was going on. The banking industry spent years paying off congress and taking huge risks that would fall onto the tax payers eventually. And no one cared because their house values were going up.

Corruption like this would be discovered much faster with healthcare. If congress got paid off by a pharm company to require docs to give all kids a new drug from the pharm company. Millions of parents would know immediately and at least a small percentage would be demanding to know why they are being pushed this new drug.

I'm not saying the govt. program will be run perfectly. Medicare isn't perfect. but the concern you raise doesn't seem to be a parallel to banking.

If you think big pharma is not doing the same shit the TBTF banksters are, think again...

From Denninger's Market Ticker:

"That's right. The Pharmaceutical and Device industry has managed to get legislation enacted prohibiting the re-importation of devices or drugs sold overseas. These overseas markets demand price controls on the drugs and devices sold there, and get it. We, on the other hand, have a 'price at what the market will bear' system.

The result is that the heart stent that is used in Canada costs a tiny fraction of what the same stent costs in The United States even though they are made by the same company.

...

Yet today it is not lawful for me to buy 100,000 doses of Viagra in Canada (where they sell for a fraction of the US price) and then ship them back to the United States. This "unlawfulness" has been artificially created by the drug and device manufacturers, who claim concern for "purity" and "counterfeits" - a red herring and in fact a false claim. There has never been a right to import or sell a counterfeit product; what these manufacturers have managed to prevent is the importation of lawfully-produced and properly labeled drugs and devices made in their own factories!"

Read the rest here: Health Care FARCE Voted Up Last Night

Yes Pharma is trying to maximize profits. I never said they weren't corrupt. I am saying that people know about the corruption between healthcare and congress in a more transparent way than the corruption between banking and congress. Exactly the same way price discrepancies like the ones you quote are easier to discover than irregular accounting practices between major banks.

Yep, pharma is trying to maximize profits. Bankers are trying to maximize profits. Bankers pay off politicians. Pharma pays off politicians.

I'd have to say that most people I talk to about these issues know next to nothing about big pharma's financial/lobbying ties to congress. They know the latest health care political talking points, inasmuch as they hear it on the 5 o'clock news, but mostly they just bitch about it. But because the financial crisis has been all over the media so much for the last year, folks seem much more attuned to the congressional genuflection before the FIRE gods.