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by atahanacar 15 days ago
>The big-medicine industrial complex is always trying to get you to have worse health so they can maximize how much they bill you when you finally break.

Ok, if this is the argument that you want to use, here is a counterargument that completely destroys your viewpoint.

Most civilized countries don't bill the patient, and it is entirely funded by either taxes or mandatory public insurance. So just like how it is in "big-medicine industrial complex's" best interest to maximize profits, it is in the health system's best interest to lower cost. So if whole-body scans for otherwise healthy (as in no symptoms) people means less profit for those companies, it means less cost for the health system, which would mean they would be promoting (or even requiring) whole-body scans. MRI machines are much cheaper than doctors.
1 comments
OutOfHere 15 days ago
The big-medicine industrial complex in this context is not the insurance firm, whether public or private. It is the biomedical firms that are developing expensive new treatments costing five, six, or seven digit dollars per patient per year, and these firms very much would prefer if you didn't take steps to catch conditions early or prevent them cheaply.
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atahanacar 15 days ago
Those firms have no say over which treatments are preferred on which patients in single-payer health systems. Actually, it is the exact opposite. When there is a single payer, they can haggle on behalf of the entire population so they have huge leverage over the treatment costs. The government can simply say "You either sell at the price that I want, or lose access to the entire market in this country.". That's why American drugs can be 10-100x more expensive than the rest of the world.
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OutOfHere 15 days ago
Their employees are here on this site too, downvoting preventative care and anything that grants health at a low cost to individuals. The corresponding gatekeeper organizations like the Endocrine Society and the The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology do their best to shamelessly disinform and seriously harm the people, e.g. via DOI 10.1210/clinem/dgae290. And don't even get me started wrt how corrupt the FDA is, serving the biomedical firms, not the people.
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