"Larry Jaques" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:59:23 -0400, with neither quill nor qualm, "Ed
Huntress" quickly quoth:

snip


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.

Put an aspirin in each eye and look:

I read some article sometime way back which stated that they had
records showing that the pill price was 250 (or 2,500?) times that of
the cost. Pills that expensive don't sell a lot, but they don't
-have- to, do they? What's the cost for Interferon and other AIDS
drugs? They're getting $1,000-1,500 per month per _patient_ for
those. Keflex (a pennicillin kin) is $45 for four pills. Seniors are
paying hundreds of dollars a month for each prescription not covered
by the vacuous and vague Medicare Part D. And I've only touched the
tip of that iceberg.

The trouble with that iceberg is that you're looking at the cost of
manufacturing the second pill, which often is pennies. But the cost of the
first pill often tops $300 million. Are you with me?

Canada gets the second pill. We have to buy the first one -- but we get to
spread the cost across all the pills we buy. If we bought the second one
there would be no one to buy the first one. Then there would be no pills for
anyone.

I'm not saying I like the situation, but that's the way it is when you don't
have price controls. All those other countries get to have price controls
only because we don't have any. Are you still with me?

Do you still like unregulated markets? Are you still planning to vote
Libertarian? Where's strabo when we need him? d8-)


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.

As I said, I have an agreement with my body to die instead of getting
really, really sick. Then burn me and feed me to the fishes. I'll be
back. wink

I'd rather see you have a system whereby paying the individual rate for
insurance coverage didn't break the bank.

--
Ed Huntress