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Here’s a curious thing I’ve experienced a few times:

1. People start talking about healthcare reform.
2. Someone points out that a single payer could negotiate better rates for services and medications, and thus would probably be rather cheaper than the market.
3. Someone replies: But you can’t do that! The high prices paid in the U.S. subsidize R&D! That’ll mean no more new drugs, or vastly fewer of them, at any rate.
4. The topic shifts to who is or is not a Cylon.
5. (Starbuck definitely is or is not a Cylon, probably.)

You don’t get to hear this argument much on the news. The current talking point seems to be that national universal healthcare through a single-payer model—or for that matter something that bears no resemblance to such a thing unless you drop lemon juice in your eyes, squint, and chant socialismsocialismsocialism—will mean the government will be interfering in the relationship between you and your doctor!!!oneone! This is worse than when insurance companies get between you and your doctor because insurance companies are part of the capitalist market and that means they’re regulated by the invisible hand of the market and the thing about the invisible hand is that it is, after all, invisible, and so you can’t possibly notice when it tells you that you can only have Abraxane shots on the sixth Tuesday of every month, and you should be glad you get that much.

But let’s go back to (3) for a moment.

Let’s assume that we want new drugs. Let’s also assume—though there’s reason to be a bit skeptical of this—that drug companies absolutely cannot absorb any drop in income, and that all such drops will invariably and negatively affect R&D.

Well, how much money are we talking, exactly?

PhRMA says that the private pharmaceutical industry spent $60 billion on research and development in 2007. Taking them at their word, that’s a lot of money! I mean, that’s nearly 6% of the Fabulous Cash Giveaway urgently necessary federal bailout of upstanding (if currently slightly tilted) financial institutions. That’s a bit more than the government gave to AIG, or a bit less than what we gave to Bank of America, Citigroup, Freddie Mac, and General Motors. Each. That’s about the cost of the F-22 Raptor, which is as we know vitally necessary for ensuring air superiority over Afghan farmers as we bomb the fuck out of them.

So I guess I can see why increasing NIH grant appropriations and overall public funding of medical research is out of the question. It’s not like there’s an existing structure for this sort of thing—drug research at universities and public clinics is practically unheard of in this or any other country. And it’s certainly not like strengthening open, publically-funded research would reduce the incidence of, say, morally-deficient fuckers patenting genes for cancer.

Thank goodness single-payer healthcare will never become a reality in the U.S.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Punkass!, Health, Human Rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.