Capitalist Healthcare
Here is an interesting article I came across the other day discussing how healthy people are a real threat to a capitalistic Big Pharma:
“Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” Goldman Sachs analysts ask
Analyst report notes that Gilead’s hep C cure will make less than $4 billion this year.
One-shot cures for diseases are not great for business—more specifically, they’re bad for longterm profits—Goldman Sachs analysts noted in an April 10 report for biotech clients, first reported by CNBC.
The investment banks’ report, titled “The Genome Revolution,” asks clients the touchy question: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” The answer may be “no,” according to follow-up information provided.
For a real-world example, they pointed to Gilead Sciences, which markets treatments for hepatitis C that have cure rates exceeding 90 percent. In 2015, the company’s hepatitis C treatment sales peaked at $12.5 billion. But as more people were cured and there were fewer infected individuals to spread the disease, sales began to languish. Goldman Sachs analysts estimate that the treatments will bring in less than $4 billion this year.
It’s easy to comprehend that it’s not profitable to cure a disease from a Pharma standpoint. A long-term corporate sustainability model would much rather continually prescribe a cure rather than outright cure the problem.
Which therein lies the problem with Big Pharma and Big Med. They both have incentives that are conflicting with what a normal society should focus on. To a nation, their profits matter far less than the health and well-being of the native citizens. Yet, to them that incentive is not the same. The capitalistic incentive would push them to focus on a revolving cure and a desiring of non-healthy patients. Whereas a society would desire the opposite: healthy citizens and outright cures.
Most people, even in the US, acknowledge that our medical system is at least somewhat broken. We pay the most but don’t receive anywhere near the best care. We’re a 50/50 system: sometimes socialistic, sometimes capitalistic with regards to healthcare. This means that the average middle-class person is paying for someone else’s health insurance and has to pay privately for their own. It’s a shitty setup for everyone involved. Especially the middle class.
The issue is that socialism doesn’t fix this. Single payer insurance merely combats the insurance side of the divide. But does nothing to the research, pharma, or Big Med sides of the divide. They would still be capitalistic in nature while the insurance would be socialistic. They would still seek a maximization of profit.
Socialist healthcare has plenty of its own problems. In degenerative societies, it’s giving the keys of your health to people that hate you. It’s great during populist rule, but not so great during elitist rule.
Still, I prefer the insurance-driven approach. As long as some private options are still allowed to exist, you can avert some of this risk. At the very least, it fixes the incentive on the insurance side. The incentive is shifted to making people healthier from an entire governmental perspective. It is also often cheaper for everyone involved, as demonstrated by comparing the US to literally any other country. But it would do nothing to fix the issues presented in this article which are the result of Big Med (intelligentsia – intellectual elites) and Big Pharma (the isolated class – financial elites). Both of which are centralizers. They are elites that only care about themselves and do nothing to benefit or serve the nation. They merely seek power and more profits that will give them more power.
Until we actually address the underlying problem, the disease will still persist. The underlying problem are these centralizers. It is not a specific type of healthcare system or a lack of a single payer insurance platform or anything else. It is simply them, the elite that are unaccountable to the public.
Until they are made to be accountable to the stakeholders, nothing will change. Until the interests of the middle class and the nation are placed above the interests of the isolated class, nothing will change.
They must be made accountable and made to serve the interests of the nation or they will forever continue with their actions. No policy change can fix that.
Read Next:
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