Conservatives, under what conditions would you allow universal coverage?

Grizzly Adams said:
You left out some things, "pal."
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Let's hear 'em. The only thing I've seen you offer is a really bad Constitutional analysis that says we aren't allowed to do UHC.

Of course, we have Medicare, we have VA health care (which unlike Medicare, is actually socialized--the military employs doctors and nurses), if those are Constitutional, why does merely expanding those programs render them inconsistent with federal law?
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
Here's an article supporting that claim. A couple of the links are broken but it cites other sources.

http://www.medicalprogresstoday.com/spotlight/spotlight_indarchive.php?id=1696

Note that I don't mean to imply this one link settles the issue.
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A couple of things:

1) Beerina made a "per capita" claim. That article flat out says the US spends 2x as much on R&D, we should be considering who is developing the best cures based on dollars spent:

Or take the gap between Europe and the U.S. biotech industries: the U.S. biotechnology industry employs twice as many people as the European biotechnology industry (190,000 compared to 96,500) and earns twice as much revenue as Europe (€41.5 billion in the U.S. vs. €21.5 in Europe.). The extra employees and revenues translate into more research: indeed, U.S. bio–techs spend on average three times as much on R&D, according to EuropaBio.
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2) Most of the initial R&D in America comes from NIH grants. The claim is one of some inchoate distinction between "capitalism" and "socialism." In other words, those dirty commie Euros aren't developing cures like the good ol' US of A. The systems, however, are remarkably similar in terms of R&D. In the US, we allow drugs developed through government grants to be purchased, I'm not sure if the same is true in Europe.

3) America is suffering through a decade-long drought of drug innovation:

Moreover, Part D’s performance vis-a-vis the early projections has had less to do with the program itself and more to do with sectorwide trends in the pharmaceuticals market, where older drugs are slipping out of patent and the development of new drugs has slowed. As the actuaries write, “The reduced estimates reflect a higher market penetration of generic drugs and a decline in the number of new drug products that are expected to reach the market during this period.” That’s why the drug savings haven’t been limited to Medicare: National drug spending is 35 percent lower (pdf) than projected in 2006. Medicare Part D is part of, rather than the driver of, that trend. And that trend, of course, is a bad one: it’s lower costs through less innovation...
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/responding-to-ryan/2011/05/19/AGZVStCH_blog.html

"Part D" is the Bush era prescription drug plan.

Drugs are insanely expensive to develop and bring to market. Not all of them succeed, meaning a company can sink billions of dollars into a drug and get nothing out of it. That type of system is a perfect one for government to absorb the negative costs.

A company may look at a potential cure and think, "seems promising, but if it doesn't work, we're going bankrupt." A government can take on that risk easily. Allowing companies to profit while government absorbs risk is a solid system in theory, and it's basically what we've done to develop that edge in innovation over the last 30-40 years.

Sadly, it's disappearing.
 
WildCat said:
If that's the case, what is your solution for people with medical problems who don't have the means to pay? I have never encountered an anti-UHC poster heree who could answer this question.

The example I'll use is a 22 year old with a part-time job and no medical insurance who slides his car into a ditch and is now paralyzed from the neck down.

We know you don't want a single dime of government money to help him so what happens? Do we just leave him in the ditch to die?
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C'mon Grizzly, don't you want to be the first person to answer this question?
 
mhaze said:
Nope. I'm only repeating Travis's argument. Don't I have the same rights as he?
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Has anyone said that under a universal health care plan you would be denied cancer treatment? I've been arguing that we would be better off as a nation if the first thing you think about when a doctor tells you that you have cancer isn't "how will I pay to get treatment?" Or "I sure hope my provider doesn't find some reason to drop me now that I have cancer."
 
TraneWreck said:
Drugs are insanely expensive to develop and bring to market. Not all of them succeed, meaning a company can sink billions of dollars into a drug and get nothing out of it. That type of system is a perfect one for government to absorb the negative costs.

A company may look at a potential cure and think, "seems promising, but if it doesn't work, we're going bankrupt."
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Or the drug might work and cure the disease, but if too few people get that disease it might not be cost effective to bother making the drug to cure them. People can die (or worse, live and suffer) simply because they aren't a big enough market share to make it worth the effort.

Health, life, and death are too important to be left at the mercy of market forces, IMO.
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
Here's an article supporting that claim. A couple of the links are broken but it cites other sources.

http://www.medicalprogresstoday.com/spotlight/spotlight_indarchive.php?id=1696
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Agenda driven sources are not exactly unbiased evidence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy_Research

You link is advertising, more specifically it's a right with "think tank" trying to promote their preferred policies. If they had real science to back up their claims they would have published it in a real journal not as a web site.

Essentially their argument is "the US has more privately funded drug research" but this fails to account for the fact that privately funded R&D is most likely working on known mechanisms so it produces drugs that while technically different, do the same thing. New mechanisms like most primary research typically comes out of universities and depends heavily on public funding.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Or the drug might work and cure the disease, but if too few people get that disease it might not be cost effective to bother making the drug to cure them. People can die (or worse, live and suffer) simply because they aren't a big enough market share to make it worth the effort.

Health, life, and death are too important to be left at the mercy of market forces, IMO.
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The line has to be drawn somewhere, regardless if the government funds it or private enterprise funds it. Or are you advocating unlimited funds be spent on every proposed research into treating every possible disease, no matter how rare, to the point of bankrupting the country?
 
lomiller said:
Agenda driven sources are not exactly unbiased evidence.
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Thanks, but I know that. As I said, they cite their sources and I don't consider that one link definitive. Your argument mostly just questions their motives and you make a counter claim you haven't supported. It would be nice if there were more evidence presented.

lomiller said:
If they had real science to back up their claims they would have published it in a real journal not as a web site.
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Well, that isn't necessarily true, and this question isn't exactly a matter of science.
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
Thanks, but I know that. As I said, they cite their sources and I don't consider that one link definitive. Your argument mostly just questions their motives and you make a counter claim you haven't supported. It would be nice if there were more evidence presented.
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Even if everything in that article is 100% true it has no relation to UHC that I can discern.

And I wonder how much of that difference is due to Viagara? It's certainly a popular drug, I don't think it's saving anyone's life though.
 
@WlidCat, It addresses the claim that the US is doing more than it's fair share of subsidizing medical research with the higher cost of health care here. Some claim that if the US lowers it's health care costs that will stifle medical research. It seems a plausible but not necessarily true claim.
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
@WlidCat, It addresses the claim that the US is doing more than it's fair share of subsidizing medical research with the higher cost of health care here. Some claim that if the US lowers it's health care costs that will stifle medical research. It seems a plausible but not necessarily true claim.
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How does paying more for an MRI translate into pharmaceutical research?
 
Neally said:
The line has to be drawn somewhere, regardless if the government funds it or private enterprise funds it. Or are you advocating unlimited funds be spent on every proposed research into treating every possible disease, no matter how rare, to the point of bankrupting the country?
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Yeah, because that's exactly what I said. Use all the resources of the entire Earth, no, the whole solar system to cure one kid with Ultrarare-Hypothetical Syndrome.

I forgot this thread was in "Politics", so only insane hyperbole applies. In which spirit, I hope you enjoy reading about the five million dead babies that result because you think SuperDrugConglomo Inc shouldn't have to take a $23 loss in fiscal quarter 2 of 2012. Those babies don't just die, their bodies explode with enormous force, killing everyone nearby and setting forest fires. Also there are quantum tunnelling effects that kill people's ancestors in the past and rupture spacetime.
 
WildCat said:
How does paying more for an MRI translate into pharmaceutical research?
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I'm not looking to debate the point in the abstract, I've seen that often enough. I was hoping to contribute evidence in the hopes that others might also.

But in case you're missing the point, no one claimed that money paid specifically for MRIs would then get applied to pharmaceutical research. The claim is a more general (or sometimes simply vague) claim that more money in the health care field means more research in the health care field and that less money in the field would mean less research in the field. It's a plausible enough claim, but it remains to be seen if the claim can be backed up or refuted by actual evidence.
 
bikerdruid said:
is this common?
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Well dropping people when they are found to have cancer is frighteningly common. As for people thinking about payment......four years ago I had food poisoning and was vomiting up blood. I debated going to the ER because I knew that ER bills are super expensive. Ultimately I didn't go to the ER specifically because of the bills that would be incurred (I was especially broke at that time) but got better anyways. I was lucky.
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
But in case you're missing the point, no one claimed that money paid specifically for MRIs would then get applied to pharmaceutical research. The claim is a more general (or sometimes simply vague) claim that more money in the health care field means more research in the health care field and that less money in the field would mean less research in the field. It's a plausible enough claim, but it remains to be seen if the claim can be backed up or refuted by actual evidence.
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I don't think I'm missing the point at all. Pharmaceutical companies do not treat patients, they only provide drugs. I don't see how paying more money to hospitals, doctors, etc translates into pharmaceutical companies having more money to spend on research.

I could see how paying pharmaceutical companies more translates into them having more money to spend on research, but that is not the claim. And I'm pretty certain that the extra costs for drugs in the US does not account for the $3,000 or so per person per year we spend on health care than just about any other 1st-world country on the planet.
 
WildCat said:
I don't think I'm missing the point at all. Pharmaceutical companies do not treat patients, they only provide drugs. I don't see how paying more money to hospitals, doctors, etc translates into pharmaceutical companies having more money to spend on research.
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Nobody in the converstaion I'm part of in this thread made the specific claim that money paid to hospitals translates to research money for pharmaceuticals.
 
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