Mexico’s 120 million citizens will begin to enjoy free, universal access to healthcare from next year, following a decree by socialist president Claudia Sheinbaum.
I have mixed feelings on this. If the entire world had access to free healthcare, chances are research and development would grind to a halt unless they also funded research and development. Taxpayers would need to be willing to pay a company hundreds of millions of dollars if they discovered a useful product.
…it can work in theory, but I’m not sure if it would work in a democracy. The average voter would demand that money be spent on more immediately useful services. If it did work, however, we would save the billions of dollars pharmaceutical companies spend on lawyers and marketing.
As opposed to now, where companies copyright and patent their medications and sell them ultimately to…taxpayers who pay them billions of dollars a year in just out of pocket costs, let alone the scheme that is the American private insurance/healthcare system.
If taxpayers had to fund drug companies or research institutions for R&D without the insane middleman that is the private healthcare/insurance system, it would cost a fraction of what it does now.
On top of that, this assumes that people won’t do research for the good of society vs becoming filthy rich, which is a false assumption driven by Capitalist propaganda. Remember that the ultra wealthy CEOs and executives of these drug companies aren’t the ones doing any of the actual work or research. That is all done by scientists and engineers, who make a decent living, but none of them are incredibly rich from it, classic Capitalist exploitation at work.
Often times these drug companies (and the private equity firms that own them) don’t even primarily do R&D, they just purchase the patents and IP rights to drugs that are already on the market, and once they do that, they jack up the price often by hundreds of percent to increase their cashflow.
That cost gets sent to the insurance companies, which of course, they pass on to consumers, raising our healthcare prices year after year.
I want medical researchers, scientists, and engineers to make a good living, a very good living, their work literally saves and improves hundreds of millions of people’s lives worldwide. But you don’t need a CEO or executives, or private equity firms owning that space and making insane amounts of money, you just literally don’t.
There are millions of very smart and passionate people around the world who want to do this kind of work because they enjoy it, and they want to make a difference. Providing an open and rigorous academic and scientific structure to study and practice this is all you need. That already exists today, many medical breakthroughs came from publicially funded research institutes, which is the way it should be.
You could fund the facilities, but how many people would be willing to get a doctorate in biological chemistry if the only available jobs were relatively low paying civil servants?
Most of the researchers in the pharmaceutical industry were employed as minimum wage workers during their six years in college. We would have to completely overhaul the incentive structure if we expected colleges to replace the for profit industry.
fun fact: I have had a years-long interest into biochemistry since i was 12, and i want to study biology because of it, but i can’t; because i don’t have the time/money, because i need to get a job now to earn money, instead of spending another 6 years in school.
If the entire world had access to free healthcare, chances are research and development would grind to a halt unless they also funded research and development. Taxpayers would need to be willing to pay a company hundreds of millions of dollars if they discovered a useful product.
I don’t see why it would. A company would still invest in research if they thought they had a chance to sell it to the healthcare system, for example. It wouldn’t be the first nor last time something like that happened, and the latter case isn’t too different from how it works already.
Consider insulin, for example. Research into it and drugs for treatment of diabetes doesn’t happen exclusively in the US.
It is my belief that every society benefits from free healthcare.
I have mixed feelings on this. If the entire world had access to free healthcare, chances are research and development would grind to a halt unless they also funded research and development. Taxpayers would need to be willing to pay a company hundreds of millions of dollars if they discovered a useful product.
…it can work in theory, but I’m not sure if it would work in a democracy. The average voter would demand that money be spent on more immediately useful services. If it did work, however, we would save the billions of dollars pharmaceutical companies spend on lawyers and marketing.
As opposed to now, where companies copyright and patent their medications and sell them ultimately to…taxpayers who pay them billions of dollars a year in just out of pocket costs, let alone the scheme that is the American private insurance/healthcare system.
If taxpayers had to fund drug companies or research institutions for R&D without the insane middleman that is the private healthcare/insurance system, it would cost a fraction of what it does now.
On top of that, this assumes that people won’t do research for the good of society vs becoming filthy rich, which is a false assumption driven by Capitalist propaganda. Remember that the ultra wealthy CEOs and executives of these drug companies aren’t the ones doing any of the actual work or research. That is all done by scientists and engineers, who make a decent living, but none of them are incredibly rich from it, classic Capitalist exploitation at work.
Often times these drug companies (and the private equity firms that own them) don’t even primarily do R&D, they just purchase the patents and IP rights to drugs that are already on the market, and once they do that, they jack up the price often by hundreds of percent to increase their cashflow.
That cost gets sent to the insurance companies, which of course, they pass on to consumers, raising our healthcare prices year after year.
I want medical researchers, scientists, and engineers to make a good living, a very good living, their work literally saves and improves hundreds of millions of people’s lives worldwide. But you don’t need a CEO or executives, or private equity firms owning that space and making insane amounts of money, you just literally don’t.
There are millions of very smart and passionate people around the world who want to do this kind of work because they enjoy it, and they want to make a difference. Providing an open and rigorous academic and scientific structure to study and practice this is all you need. That already exists today, many medical breakthroughs came from publicially funded research institutes, which is the way it should be.
I also believe in free education, which includes research facilities.
You could fund the facilities, but how many people would be willing to get a doctorate in biological chemistry if the only available jobs were relatively low paying civil servants?
Most of the researchers in the pharmaceutical industry were employed as minimum wage workers during their six years in college. We would have to completely overhaul the incentive structure if we expected colleges to replace the for profit industry.
fun fact: I have had a years-long interest into biochemistry since i was 12, and i want to study biology because of it, but i can’t; because i don’t have the time/money, because i need to get a job now to earn money, instead of spending another 6 years in school.
I don’t see why it would. A company would still invest in research if they thought they had a chance to sell it to the healthcare system, for example. It wouldn’t be the first nor last time something like that happened, and the latter case isn’t too different from how it works already.
Consider insulin, for example. Research into it and drugs for treatment of diabetes doesn’t happen exclusively in the US.
Wow, like youre not even considering billionaire pedophiles.
Won’t someone please think of the billionaires?
And the children its way easier to fuck if they all rely on grants from you for cancer treatment?
Bonus; no fatties once they start chemo!