Replies to post #51045 on Biotech Values

[corpstrat]

<<Either the market will set prices based on supply and demand, or the government will set prices based on budget priorities and bureaucrats' best guess at what specific goods and services should cost.>>

What bloody nonsense. Supply and demand don't set price in highly oligopolistic markets like health care, with all sorts of crazy reimbursement and contract schemes going on and the patient not spending his / her own money at the point of use. The $100 aspirin, anyone? Bureaucrats inevitably set such prices - private organization bureaucrats at Blue Cross, United Health and the hospital chains. In a more efficient single-payer system, prices aren't much needed - resource budgets are what matters.

As Sicko did a good job of illustrating, English GPs have been making out rather nicely of late, so the usual WSJ scare tactic about docs' incomes is also way overstated in this piece.

[Tim Fowler]

That's six years without an increase. And unless Congress acts, doctors face a 10% cut in reimbursements in 2008, and a 40% cut by 2016.

Is that a cut in nominal reimbursement, real reimbursement, or a cut in what reimbursements where planned to have been?