These kind of comments just boggle the mind:
I have no problem with the profit motive of companies bring life saving medications to mankind. Would there be extremely cheap HIV medications available to the Third World today if profit orientated companies didn't develope them expecting a return on their investment?
How does getting people who can afford it to take up private insurance, thus taking the pressure of the public system, bad? And how is protecting patents on inventions a bad thing? Patents expire in very short order these days. Companies that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in getting a drug to market get a small window of opportunity to make a bit of money on that investment. When the patent expires, you see all the generic brands coming out. Lexapro wasn't here fo 5 years before the patent expired. Now I'm on some generic version. I must admit I felt a bit sorry for the company that invented Lexapro - they single handedly changed my life by bringing my bipolar episodes under something akin to control. Now some fly-by-night mob that risked nothing to invent Lexapro can undercut the original firm and still make huge sums of money for basically doing very little.
No one is saying that the pharmeceutical industry shouldn't make a good 'return on their investment', but like the oil industry, making a good, even excellent profit isn't enough for the greedy bastards that run the health industry. There's a huge difference between making a damn good profit and gouging the hell out of the public. The horror stories you hear about Americans that are denied health insurance if they've ever had something like cancer or other serious diseases, is simply appalling. I did a thread on this not too long ago and one of the posters on here desperatly needs some tests done, but since she had cancer a few years ago, she can't get any coverage any more and is left owing tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills.
My boss is good friends with the man who owns one of the drug companies up here in Ontario. Even though the government puts a cap on how much they can charge for drugs, this guy's company is worth over a billion dollars. The problem in the States is that there is no cap on what doctors charge for their services, there's no cap on what Insurance companies charge for premiums (and then look for any way to get out of paying for it) and there's no cap on what the drug companies charge for medication. The whole industry has gotten completely out of hand and it's time that changes were made. Funding a National Health Care system in the States could probably be done by two things: Raise taxes by 1% or 2% and pull the troops out of Iraq. Bush has had no problem spending a trillion dollars on this stupid war-----I'm sure the funds could be found for something useful like a healthcare system.
As someone else already mentioned, I don't know of anyone in Canada who's lost there house due to 'medical bills'. When I had cancer a few years ago, everything was paid for: the operation, all the doctors' visits, meals, hosptial room (I think I paid $20.00 extra for semi-private that my benefits didn't cover), radiation, follow up visits, etc. When you've got a life threatening illness, the last thing you need to be stressing about is: how am I going to pay for this? Yes we're very highly taxed up here and for all the taxes we pay, our health care system is grossly underfunded and the wait lists can definitely be long. However, if you have something like cancer that requires immediate attention you'll get it. I found out that if I had had to wait longer than 2 months for my surgery, OHIP would have paid for me to get it done in the States.
I hope Hillary Clinton gets in and does something about it. It's an absolute disgrace that the richest country in the world has a system where people are still dying because they can't afford treatment.
