No, but well over a third of their revenue comes from the United States.

Is your thesis that Big Pharma is in favor of socialized medicine? I'd think not, and for good reasons as far as business goes.

I mean, you could write them a check yourself if you feel like you haven't been paying them enough. It'll go to good use!

i expect gsk are much happier doing business in america since your govt has created a situation where they can charge u 3x what they charge me for the same stuff

You say this, yet bizarrely doctor salaries in UHC countries remain quite high. In fact I have a friend who is a doctor here in Canada and he just bought a house worth well over $1 million. He's just a GP too.

It's free in Canada. In fact if you refer to my posting earlier in the thread I had a health condition just this year that is requiring four surgeries and a lot of outpatient treatment over the next 12 months, and I haven't paid a nickel for any of it, outside of about $17 in prescription drugs, and I make pretty good money.

I'm a small business owner too, so if I were living in the US while all this had happened I'd be pretty much f**ked -- without Obamacare of course.

I've said it before, but you have to literally be an idiot to prefer the US style system compared to single payer like we have here. Like I'm talking as dumb as a house plant.

It's a shame that Democrats are such obstructionists, this thing really had a chance

What you're describing isn't "the profit motive" though. You're describing a reduction in income.

Man, if only there were a way to fund medical research that didn't involve paying hospital administration staff and Big Pharma shareholders unlimited amounts of money via health care costs. Why, maybe we could take that money and fund, like, a national institution of health research or something. Like, those guys have so much money, we could probably even fund a whole bunch of such institutes!

70 dollars for a co-pay would absolutely never fly in the USA under a single-payer system for the much of the population that such a system like that is intended to help. I assume you're just well-off and it's an income-based copay?

dunno what you mean by copay

your two options here are

A) wait 13 days, pay 0 quid
B) wait 0 days, pay 55 quid

i have always picked option A on my visits

Is he now house poor? Bachelor? Location more specific than "Canada"? These things matter.

My wife and I could technically qualify for a million dollar home, but we'd be fools to buy one, and where I live, that would be far more house than I knew what to do with. If I was in SoCal, a million dollars doesn't even buy my current house.

What is your monthly contribution via taxation though? That has to be factored in. If not you, then someone else is paying for it. Great success, in that case.



That makes sense. Do you know if it was like that from the beginning? Keeping people from treating a GP as an emergency room seems just as important as the current problem in the US, where they have to try to stop people from treating the emergency room like a GP.

Right out of high school, I worked in collections, and part of my rotation was accounts from the local hospital system trying to collect $20 co-pays from people who went to the emergency room for things that were clearly not an emergency. That experience most certainly played a role in developing my worldview today.

Lol. Inso just going crazy.

Cool title. I would of went with "Trump trucks"

This ****in guy



https://twitter.com/FoxNews/status/887315595682881537

Well at least we know it's not just Trump who reflexively avoids responsibility.

So I've been haggling over some medical bills with the hospital I doctor at which has been an interesting experience. Just continues to show me how screwed up our system is on so many levels. The fundamental problem is a large percent of patients either can't or are unwilling to pay for treatment, so all that cost gets wrapped into my bill because I'm actually going to pay.

Seems there are literally 4 solutions to this
1) current crazy Frankenstein of a system
2) make the hospitals/nurses/doctors work for free for the patients who can't pay
3)refuse to treat all people who can't prove their ability to pay ahead of time
4)provide some form of universal heath care/coverage like basically every other western country in the world.

Regretful indeed. Haha a loser or a quitter. Pick one Turtle boy.

Can you guys imagine what Fox would be like if this were Obama? Just non-stop he's abandoned his role as a leader. Totally ineffectual. Impeach him because he's in way over his head. Yadda yadda yadda.

LOL every "liberal" paper in America thoughtlessly parroted "Mitch McConnell, master of the senate" bull**** for the last 6 months. GJGE.

There is already a substantial issue with scarcity of frontline doctors in the U.S. so we should not get ahead of ourselves. Most GPS don’t treat a lot of stuff thrust handled 30 years ago. Plus most of the time if you wake up sick and call your doctor they are likely going to initially give you an appointment a week or more out.

That never was the case and if you are feeling bad enough most offices will try to squeeze you in. But most GP offices are overloaded with mundane medicine checks and other issues. Obviously this is not all practices but it is pretty much all successful GP practices where they often have 50% of their patients seeing a NP or PA as well.

We need to increase access to front line medicine by expanding the roles of NPs and PAs but we also need to make it more financially feasible for doctors versus pretty much every single specialization.

Yeah, this is the first time that I'm starting to think McConnell isn't the evil chessmaster I've been giving him credit for. The strategy of "Tell the moderates that the medicaid cuts won't ever actually take place, then hope the conservatives don't find out" is just [kisses fingers].

Yeah this is one of the big arguments for ridiculous drug prices. That R&D needs to be paid for. The problem is a ton of R&D is contributed by universities funded by states and the federal governments.

As you noted scientists and the researchers are not the ones reaping the benefits from all this money so the ability to successfully spend less for the same level of R&D is obvious.

Separating the research and development of medicine from the commodity production and distribution of medication would be of significant benefit. Given the stakes of healthcare and medication its not appropriate for people to try and use other industries as analogies.

Some people don’t see that capitalism and free markets are actually crippling some unique industries that get enough protection to make them rificulously overpriced.

Of course how to we merge the current GOP desire for always smaller government with the obvious reality some areas need more direct government impact. That they can not see any nuance in that at all is problematic.

You gotta grade on a curve here...McConnell is a parliamentary wizard like Paul Ryan is a policy wonk or Donald Trump is smart enough to be a mediocre POTUS.

He's in Calgary. He probably makes in excess of 300k per year and doesn't even work full time. He just fills in for other docs when they need to take time off.

My taxes are similar to what I paid when I lived in the US -- maybe a few hundred bucks more a year. A lot of that owes more to the fact that Canada is a huge place with hardly anyone living in it than to health care, though. But to be honest, who cares? I have enough money to buy pretty much anything I want and as an added bonus when I got sick earlier this year I didn't die. Plus I didn't go bankrupt. Had I still lived in the US and had the same condition I would've faced the very real prospect of either one of those, if not both.

Like I said, anyone who favors private insurance over single payer is literally an idiot. I've lived under both systems. Yours is orders of magnitude worse than ours. Plus yours has the extra fun addition of being more expensive for pretty much everyone -- employers, insurance companies, taxpayers, and the government. Because in case you didn't get the memo all those people in the USA who didn't get the super sweet deal of having someone else pay for our health care like we do in commie Canada, still get the option of running to the ER for pretty much anything they need and having the taxpayers pay for it in the end anyways. Though of course when they do that it costs y'all about 3x as much as if you'd just gone ahead and given them Medicaid. (In fact I believe that was sorta the point of the ACA)

Like you couldn't design a worse system if you tried. And I believe we've discussed that at least a dozen times over the years in the thousand odd pages of this thread. Maybe you should try reading it sometime.

McConnell knows enough about Senate rules to block bills. He knows much more about Senate rules than any of us. I guess that's impressive, but it's his job to know those rules. I know much more about poker and patent law than he does, but that doesn't make me some kind of wizard.

I've lived under both and I'd disagree pretty strongly with this. The US system is absolutely better if you are upper middle class or better. You'll get better and faster care than you will in Canada.

It's probably roughly equivalent for the majority of middle class people with decent employer insurance and stable jobs.

And, of course, the poor, the unlucky, the people that lost their jobs, the people who made a few bad decisions in life, etc. are all way worse off in the US.

So, don't get me wrong, I'll take Canada's system over the US system any day (and I had good employer insurance in the States). But there are tradeoffs and I think non-idiots could favor the US model.

This is my favorite post of Inso's little posting spree. It's like he just realized single payer could happen in the US someday and he now realizes he knows nothing about it and has to figure out why its such a bad idea.