"Larry Jaques" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:58:22 -0400, with neither quill nor qualm, "Ed
Huntress" quickly quoth:
Meantime, here's another one: I have a nice new insulin pump with feedback
sitting in a box next to me, to be stuck into/onto me tomorrow. It cost
$6,000. 35 years ago I had a 25-cent syringe and a $10/month bottle of
insulin, and that was it, pard'. Pumps didn't exist. Neither did home
blood-glucose monitoring. I just took a stab at it -- literally. g I got
lucky and survived it with my limbs, kidneys, and eyes. Good luck for me.
Yes, good luck for you, Phaser Eyes.
Health Care is essentially unavailable in the US without insurance.
That
is hijacking health care holding Americans hostage.
Actually, that's not the case. Emergency rooms can't refuse you, and many
people use ERs as their primary-care physicians. Then the rest of us pay
for
it.
Right, the price starts at $500 to walk in and you're usually up over
a grand by the time you walk out. When I took friends into the ER in
Vista, I saw nothing but non-English speaking folks in there. The ER
even has to treat illegals and La Migra won't even come arrest them
after they're treated. We pay for it all.
My half a dozen potential ER trips were made non-issues for me by me.
I cleaned the cut and butterflied it together with Bacitracin inside.
It was always like new by a couple weeks later.
You're a lucky guy. My one ER trip was for kidney stones. I don't know what
you could do about that on your own -- especially since you're doubled over
and puking your guts out at the time.
There's always a ready market for new drugs and new medical technology.
True, and sometimes the costs are justified. But recognize that a full
60% of new drugs are governmentally subsidized through university
research
then turned over to pharmaceuticals for manufacture and distribution
with
but a bare tithe to the university while Abbott et. al. gains usuary
profits on our own tax dollar.
sigh I'm well aware of how that works. My last job in a medical
communication agency involved a drug on which Sanofi-Aventis had paid
something like $135 million in development costs, and $110 million in
pre-approval marketing costs (which was paying my salary). Then the FDA
decided not to approve the drug. So my company laid half of us off. d8-)
You should have been in the other half, Ed. 
The editor who stayed had me on seniority and made half my salary. And there
wasn't much to write or edit without that drug (rimonabant) to work on. g
The basic research on that drug was not from a university, however. I know
that a lot of the basic research is done in universities. What you may not
know is that the testing that the pharma companies have to go through
after
some basic-science lab makes a discovery often costs ten times more than
the
basic research.
Generics, Canadian, and other sources are often 90% cheaper.
Of course. Generics just ride on the research, testing, post-marketing
studies and marketing that was done for the original drug. All they have
to
recover is manufacturing costs and quality-control reporting. In Canada,
they have price controls and just refuse to allow the drug companies to
amortize research and development. The Canadians, and the French, and the
Brits, and everyone else knows that they can collect those costs in the
US.
Don't like it? Talk to your congressman. The money has to come from
somewhere, or nobody will have any new drugs.
Yabbut why 400-25,000% profit for seventeen years?
Larry, those are publicly owned companies. If they're making 25,000% profit
(I won't ask how that was calculated -- my instincts tell me it would be
painful to hear), what would their net on sales look like? You can look up
their annual reports online to check that out.
Health care insurance is just another facade by those who have
plundered our economy. Have you tried to get a doctors appointment
without insurance?
Ask Larry.
Non responsive.
Oh, Larry is quite responsive, and he has no insurance. He's the one to
ask.
Sorry, he's in my filters for previous infractions. Is he worth
unfiltering for awhile, Ed?
I think that conversation has come to an end.
I've had insurance without a break for decades, excepting one gap of a few
months when my COBRA ran out and I was having trouble getting new
insurance.
(My doctors knew it, and took me anyway.) So I don't know what it's like
now.
I have an agreement with my body that if I have to get really sick,
it'll just let me go into the recycle bin. It keeps me well and I take
as good a care of it as I know how. I do buy bandaids, though.
As someone who felt that way for almost all of his life, I understand what
you're saying. As someone who almost died less than two years ago, my
thinking has changed -- especially since I would have lost the farm without
insurance.
Having a family changes one's thinking on all of that, too. Fortunately for
me, that's the reason *I* was well covered.
--
Ed Huntress