Legacy Thread

[basserdan]

Gee, Ya Think?

By Karl Denninger
2017-02-05 06:00

What more needs to be said? ( http://tinyurl.com/jr8q9m8 )

In Bangalore, India, heart surgeons perform daily state-of-the-art heart surgery on adults and children at an average cost of $1,800. For the record, that’s about 2% of the $90,000 that the average heart surgery costs in the United States. And when it comes to the quality of the heart surgery, the patient outcomes are among the best in the world.

Why?

Simple: There is no financialization. ( http://tinyurl.com/zfqteop )

You can't make someone else pay for your medical treatment in India.

Most families in India have no health insurance, and often need to borrow the money to pay for surgery.

And there are no guarantees on the debt either: You can't exactly repossess a heart operation!

Quality? Better than in the United States.

How about drugs? Let's talk insulin:

The medication had identical action to what's sold in the U.S. And its preloaded syringes, with a sophisticated calibrating mechanism, were more accurate in dose than any I've seen. What was most remarkable was the price — less than 10% of what it costs Americans with diabetes today. The combination of massive scale and appropriate pricing accounted for the 10-fold difference.

What's missing from this article?

Any mention of the fact that the only reason drug prices haven't dropped like a stone is that it's illegal to import that Insulin here to the United States. Were it not Novartis and the other insulin makers here wouldn't sell a single dose at 10x the price, especially when their dosing systems are inferior.

I've often said that the total cost of medical care would drop by 85% if we simply enforced the law, specifically 15 USC Chapter 1, against all medically-related firms -- including pharma, hospitals, device makers and doctors.

This article is evidence that I'm being conservative and the actual drop might even exceed 90%.

Of course to do that you need to take all the monopolists -- which means damn near all of the doctors, hospital administrators, drug company executives, "pharmacy benefit managers" and more out back and........

Indict them.

If we don't, and if we keep doing what we've been doing then eventually those who are condemned might just decide to take some of them out back and do something a less-lawful than indicting them.

Will Trump do anything about this?

Based on the best evidence available to date, NO.

Don't bet your first nickel on him doing a damn thing about any of this, despite it being very clear that mere restoration of a competitive market would make "health insurance" entirely unnecessary for essentially everyone in the United States.

Pfizer has already said they have no intention of altering their pricing model after the recent pharma meeting. Why should they until and unless their entire executive office gets indicted on many-thousands of counts of federal felonies under 15 USC?

In the meantime if you need treatment for something serious -- get on a plane.

If you currently have, or are on the path toward a chronic condition that requires continuing medical assessment and treatment if it's possible to stop or reverse that you had better or you're going to be bankrupted, dead or both.

And if you're already past the point of being able to do anything about it? Make peace with God.

Until and unless Trump does start indicting this entire segment of the economy (or he makes clear that if they don't cut the crap right now he will, and if challenged, he does) he is not your friend, he will not stop the detonation of this nation's finances nor your financial and personal destruction and yet it is entirely within his power to do both right now, without Congressional involvement since the laws necessary to do so already exist.

Trump may be my President just as he is yours if you live in the United States, but any President who has the power of the Executive to put a stop to this crap under existing law and fails to do so, when it constitutes nearly one dollar in five spent in America today and 37% of last year's federal spending is a five-alarm dickhead, irrespective of what other policies he may or may not implement. That refusal literally kills hundreds of thousands of Americans a year and financially ruins millions more -- far more than any terrorist or even war has managed to claim.

And that's a fact.

https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=231806