[zests]

Healthcare costs per capita are generally higher in the US than they are in Europe. I am curious whether or not you think we should focus on increasing spending to increase medicare coverage or if we should focus on decreasing healthcare costs for the country as a whole.

The right answer is probably "both" but you can't exactly vote for "both" political parties. Its a boring answer anyway :)

[xg15]

So, what proposals have republicans for decreasing healthcare costs? Remind people to get sick less?

[zests]

> Trump Administration Announces Historic Price Transparency Requirements to Increase Competition and Lower Healthcare Costs for All Americans

> President Trump Signs “Most Favored Nation Price” Executive Order on Drug Pricing

Here are two headlines I offer without comment that can be searched with your favorite search engine for more information.

[xg15]

I get this [1] when googling.

Fair enough. More transparency is certainly a worthwhile goal, however, this rests on the basic assumption that a consumer always has the opportunity to make a rational choice between different alternative products or services (drugs, medical procedures, etc).

From what I've read, I doubt this is the problem in practice. Are you going to compare prices during a medical emergency? If your doctor tells you that you need an X-ray, will you stop him and check the nearby hospitals whether their X-rays are cheaper? How useful is price transparency if your essential medication is only made by a single company that can do arbitrary price hikes? What do you do if the "market rate" for some essential operation is still more than you can afford?

[1] https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2019/11/15/trump-administrati...

[bergstromm466]

> Here are two headlines I offer without comment that can be searched with your favorite search engine for more information.

Headlines are not arguments...

[zests]

I didn't realize we were arguing.

[bergstromm466]

A proposal can be an argument.

"Legal Definition of argument. 1: a reason or the reasoning given for or against a matter under discussion — compare evidence, proof. 2: the act or process of arguing, reasoning, or discussing especially: oral argument."

[bergstromm466]

> I am curious whether or not you think we should focus on increasing spending to increase medicare coverage or if we should focus on decreasing healthcare costs for the country as a whole.

Yes, both.

> focus on decreasing healthcare costs for the country as a whole

Most importantly, I believe that through the patent system 1) Pharmaceutical Corporations, together with 2), politicians - who are corrupted through lobbying and who thus make advantageous laws (for Corps) - are getting away with murder. Yash Tandon gives a great example of this below:

“During the 1980s and 1990s I worked in many countries in eastern and southern Africa, and then for four years at the South Centre—2005–09. I can say from my experience that the industrialised countries of the North have been trying systematically to block all efforts by the countries of the South to industrialise. Their mega-corporations have tried—and, alas, succeeded—in privatising knowledge, and using it to promote corporate profits over the lives of people."

[...]

“It is the seeds and pharmaceutical companies of the West that have pirated the knowledge of seeds and medicinal products from the South. But whereas in the South this knowledge was shared as a public asset, the Western companies, having learnt from the South, proceeded to claim it as their private property. They are guilty—morally guilty—for the avoidable deaths of millions of people in the South who cannot afford their ‘patented’ medicines against, for example, AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other killer diseases. It is a sordid story. But it is not all doom and gloom. Those who control the system (the global corporations and the international organisations that the West controls) do not get their own way entirely. Wars do not always end in the victory of the militarily or ‘intellectually’ powerful.”

- Yash Tandon, Trade Is War: The West's War Against the World