I find is odd that capitalist bias countries like to use tax money for huge military commitments, yet go insane at the idea of providing health care for its people.
Capitalism does not make any moral sense what so ever. Its is not supposed to. It is survival of the fittest. It is vicious and heartless. And it is supposed to be. So, socialist type stuff is required to serve other needs.
Of course socialist stuff need capitalist profits to support it, while capitalism needs socialist stuff, like law, to support it.
Broadly, that is how I see it anyway.
(Granted, the US system is still better than that of third-world countries like India. At least you might get some assistance.)
I have never been to the US but from what I have been reading about it I have no question in my mind we are in a much better position. Please note I am mostly talking about the privately owned hospitals and clinics here. The government owned free clinics and hospitals are not used by anybody else except the poorest of poor in India.
> At least you might get some assistance.
This statement just reeks of ignorance and prejudice. There is a very good chance that people facing an expensive medical procedure will have higher chance of survival in India due to the abundance of advanced medical facilities throughout the country.
People facing an expensive medical procedure may have higher chance of survival in India, but people facing emergency medical procedure certainly do not. Have you ever faced a medical emergency outside of the big metropolitan cities in India? My father had a cardiac arrest and he lost his life because neither the ambulance nor the hospital had a working defibrillator. And could not find one for the three hours that he was in the hospital (This incident took place in a state capital and not some tiny town). In contrast, the emergency response system in the US is amazing. Even the ambulances are well equipped with emergency care equipment.
I totally agree with you on the state of emergency medical services. We still have a lot to improve on here but things are getting better with time.
Besides manufacturing is already cheap. That's the whole reason generic drugs exist. It's easy to copy something someone else has invested 10s of billions in creating in the first place.
...those profits don't have to be drug company profits, so that's irrelevant. Not to mention, focusing on the status quo source of government spending power somewhat begs the question in the context of "does capitalism still make moral sense?"
> Does capitalism still make moral sense...
Suggesting that capitalism is immoral.
retail costs can go down, as they do in the rest of the world when governments set price controls, but if every country on earth set a low price on pharmaceuticals, you would begin to worry that these companies would no longer have an incentive to innovate, which is potentially as or more dangerous than the status quo insofar as newer treatments would be less likely to occur in our lifetime.