by liam 95 Replies latest social current
Anonymous
I would say to the pharmaceutical companies:
Grow a pair and charge full pin to the rest of the world.
They are privately owned businesses. They are free to charge as they please, whatever the market will bear. I don’t think they are obligated to sell in the Canadian or European markets.
And Sounds like American consumers need to wake up and refuse to pay those high prices for their meds.
Anonymous
Do you have a clue what the f#@k you are talking about?
Have you ever been to Canada ?
If I need to see a doctor, I walk into a clinic or hospital and see one. Usually within an hour.
They write up a prescription and I go to a pharmacy of my choice and get my prescription filled. I pay for the meds and claim it back on my private insurance
Its that easy
I’m not sure if Americans can do this but Canadians can pay out of pocket for some procedures if they go to a different province.
If I don’t want to wait 3 months for a “free” MRI scan I can drive 2 hours to another province and pay $1200 and get it done this week.
The same applies to joint replacement surgeries. I can pay the $25000 and get it done quickly in another province or I can wait 6 months for a free one.
"Anonymous
Do you have a clue what the f#@k you are talking about?"
Lol. Read enough of his pontifications and you realize he is The Dunning-Kruger effect made flesh.
@hoser: I’m just using publicly available data on Canadian public healthcare right now. As you say, you have your private insurance option, which makes you relatively wealthy and you thus pay twice for the same ‘service’, you go to the “rich people” queue at the doctors, if your doctor even sees public healthcare patients at all.
That’s not “typical” for your average Canadian. Off course this is not what you above were describing, what was said is that bus loads of people come across the border, walk into a pharmacy, pick up free medicine from the public healthcare pharmacy and go back to the US which is BS.
As far as to your comments about MRI. You need to drive 2 hours to a different state to get an MRI and pay out of pocket? I can call my local doctor, if urgent, be seen same day, pay $15, if he says, go get an MRI right now I can go to a hospital or other provider which there are literally more than a dozen MRI suites, even an animal one, in about 30 minute distance, for $35 specialist copay I have the MRI done and read and sent back to my doctor. And this happened to my wife after pregnancy, we had a neuro consult in <1h. A few months later I get a bill that says the procedure would have cost me about $700/h for the MRI and there are line items for contrast fluid that was manufactured at the local cyclotron with a half life measured in hours and other services, totaling a few thousand (oh, gasp, healthcare is expensive) my insurance will cover it. If you have no insurance and you have insufficient income to pay for it, Medicare/Medicaid and the hospital will cover it, which is why healthcare in the US is so expensive, because it is expensive, it is fast and efficient and private businesses pays for most of it. The majority of Americans don’t die due to lack of healthcare, they die because they are fat and it is cheap enough and easier to medicate than make lifestyle changes, meanwhile our Canadian friends are promoting suicide to anyone that becomes too expensive.
This is true for any “poor” (<$50k income) American which Medicare/Medicaid covers most if not all of their cost. This is true for any illegal immigrant or Canadian that walks across the border (which happens a lot, I live close to Canada) because hospitals are obligated to provide healthcare - unlike Canada, the hospital I work for can’t put people in queues, refuse care or adjust wait times depending on whether they have insurance. People here get upset if they had to wait 2 hours to see a doctor because they presented to the emergency room with a sneeze.
We actually have ~15 3T MRI suites in just 1 hospital system, most hospital systems in the US have at least 1, even the rural ones. Many of them are used for research as well when not busy which is a significant amount of revenue. Our northern neighbors in Saskatchewan have exactly 5 3T MRI facilities across the entire province with 3 of them being ‘private’ practices. I work in that field so I know they are building 1 suite for the public healthcare facility in Saskatoon. We currently have 2 on order for our regional (not even state wide) hospital system.
Anonymous, you are using examples of companies already manufacturing inside the US.
That is absurdly different to a company that operates on the other side of the world and now wants to set up in the US. You make it sound like it's a trivial thing to do.
@joey: name me an example of a product that is absolutely not at all manufacturable or being manufactured in the US today.
TAA compliance requires most goods the government buys are manufactured or substantially modified in the US. Expand that base.
There are loads of things that without China subsidizing their exports would be too expensive to ship across the oceans. Placing a reciprocal tariff on those things is going to reduce that heavy, unnecessary shipping which is a large cause of carbon emissions.
People have long complained that certain products are being sourced in the US, shipped to China, assembled, shipped back to the US where the US then pays China through their tariffs. And there is plenty of that going on around the world to evade taxes and export controls.
What will end is being able to get the cheap junk from China that fills up our landfills. I don’t know why one of the richest countries per capita should not get more durable products.
What many people don’t understand is that the “good” jobs aren’t coming back.
Very good point, and one which seems to be entirely missed during this entire exchange. The process actually began some 60 years ago with the introduction of the Programmable Logic Controller (or PLC), and has only intensified ever since.
As Hoser points out, it has now got to the stage where even the service industries are affected.
Any production facility that is not now fully automated is as good as dead in the water, and automation has even progressed into the stores and transport side of operations. (Gone are the days of having to "wake up the storeman" every time your needed to requisition parts or materials!)
Driverless haul trucks have been a reality in the mining industry for over ten years now, thus eliminating what used to be a small army of highly paid heavy equipment operators. And the list goes on!
AnnaNana,
Someone with "boots on the ground" may not agree with you.
Despite what you are there insinuating, I, too, speak from first-hand experience (or "boots on the ground", as you put it).
During the 47 years I was involved with electrical power generation, I saw firsthand how automation transformed that industry by an astonishing degree. When I first entered it back in 1978, power station control rooms had to be manned continuously. This required three 8-hour shifts, each with at least three operating personnel, just to get through a single 24-hour period. In fact, becoming a power station operator was an attractive career choice for electricians, fitters or instrument technicians who wanted to progress "off the tools".
However, well before the year 2000, these same power stations had become totally deserted for 16 hours of the day; and with only maintenance staff being present during the remainder of the time. Almost all the production operator jobs had been eliminated by "Tech" (in the form of PLCs, Distributed Control Systems and SCADA).
Tech is limited and becoming overly reliant on it is unwise. The human component of life and work is integral to success of the earth
Not so, it gets rid of the most unreliable part of the entire process - the error prone human operator.
This "blossom" of tech will not last. It is not sustainable
Back in the day, there was plenty of that sort of talk going on, too! None of it, though, proved to be correct.
@truthlover: Please note that what you are proposing here is illegal and risky and you would not be covered under Canadian healthcare cost. Additionally you would not have any recourse against either your provider or the pharmacy or the pharmaceutical company for ANY issues that crop up (wrong dose, wrong product, manufacturing defects etc).
Unlike Canadians on public healthcare, you would pay full non-insurance price for those medications which between that and the travel and the fact you're facing thousands of dollars in fines and court costs, is unlikely to make it worth the trip - I've just reviewed some common medication and sometimes it's slightly more expensive, sometimes slightly less expensive than the non-insured cost in the US, but in the US you would still be covered by insurance or some discount program like GoodRx.
