Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fastball 211 days ago
Cancer is expensive everywhere, the difference is who pays for it.
3 comments

actually a difference is also how many players along the supply chain siphon money out of the process. the more greed is allowed and acted on for the treatment, the more expensive it gets. introduce layers of insurances, hedgefonds, pension funds, lobbyism, ... it adds up to riddiculous amounts far beyond the original R&D/infrastructure/treatment costs.
And those are just the downsides of a market-based system. There are also upsides of single-payer systems, like monopsony buying power.
And also downsides, e.g. many treatments just aren't available, and many others would never have had their discovery funded without the market-based system existing.
Governments can (and do) directly fund medical research including drug discovery. This is in part because governments of even just middling competence have an incentive to keep their workforce (which also includes their military) healthy.
Nobody is advocating for eliminating a market-based system. My country (Australia) has both single-payer and a market-based private healthcare system.
You can imagine how that system, like most, is actually getting its medical advancements from the US.
This… is a think that people believe, but it’s not as simple as that. Most basic research is universities, all over the place. Many drugs are developed in Europe. A lot of medical machinery is developed and made in Europe (Siemens, Philips and Roche are huge in this space). Like most things, med tech is fairly globalised.
This is a comforting lie Americans tell themselves to justify being ripped off.

You pay double the OECD average, and more per person for healthcare than the Swiss - and that's only counting the publicly funded parts!

This implies the US is subsidizing the world's healthcare system and sacrificing it's own citizens for the benefit of every non-American.

You're ok with that?

This doesn't make any sense. If you make a thing, the price you set for selling that thing in a country has little to do with where you happen to be living when you made that thing.
It's a lot more expensive in the US. Three years of ribociclib is US$100k here in Argentina, which dwarfs the usual costs of things like chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgical resection. (All of which is normally paid for either by a health plan or by the public hospital system.) In the US, if you have to go through all of that, I think the cost is going to be at least an order of magnitude higher.
This is either intentional bad faith trolling or you are not aware of the per capita spending on healthcare in the US.

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

You don't think cancer is an expensive disease to treat? You don't think it involves a lot of inputs?