Does Drug Development Require Profit?

[bilby]

You're not addressing the financial benefit of having your collections department off the books.

The collections department is on a differant set of books that is available to the public.

The point is you aren't counting collections cost against the cost of providing the healthcare. You should be counting it, though.

What collections costs?

The federal government pays out of their general revenue account. Do you imagine that they might become delinquent? Are the hospitals going to have to garnish their wages, or send the repo man to confiscate their car and their TV set?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The point is you aren't counting collections cost against the cost of providing the healthcare. You should be counting it, though.

Collection costs pay for themselves.

Or you wouldn't do it.

Which has nothing do with my point--that they are off the books and not showing up as part of the cost.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The point is you aren't counting collections cost against the cost of providing the healthcare. You should be counting it, though.

What collections costs?

The federal government pays out of their general revenue account. Do you imagine that they might become delinquent? Are the hospitals going to have to garnish their wages, or send the repo man to confiscate their car and their TV set?

Why is everyone ignoring the fact that collection costs money and thus it should be counted as part of the cost of providing Medicare? Are you Republicans that only care about the position, not the truth?

 

[bilby]

The point is you aren't counting collections cost against the cost of providing the healthcare. You should be counting it, though.

What collections costs?

The federal government pays out of their general revenue account. Do you imagine that they might become delinquent? Are the hospitals going to have to garnish their wages, or send the repo man to confiscate their car and their TV set?

Why is everyone ignoring the fact that collection costs money and thus it should be counted as part of the cost of providing Medicare? Are you Republicans that only care about the position, not the truth?

The marginal cost of collecting taxes to cover medical costs, over and above the existing cost of collecting taxes for everything else, is so minuscule as to be completely negligible. Single payer eliminates the existing systems of billing and collections, it doesn't just put the onus on the government to do these things in the same way that insurers currently do.

The fact that collections cost money isn't the same as the fact that collections always cost similar amounts of money, nor is it a fact that it's unreasonable to treat savings of 99.999999% as approximately 100%.

You are (as usual) making perfect the enemy of good, where the good reflects well on a position at odds with your ideology.

 

[untermensche]

The point is you aren't counting collections cost against the cost of providing the healthcare. You should be counting it, though.

Collection costs pay for themselves.

Or you wouldn't do it.

Which has nothing do with my point--that they are off the books and not showing up as part of the cost.

It has everything to do with your unsupported claim that Medicare is not as efficient as for-profit health insurance.

You know what profit means in terms of health insurance?

It is money that is removed from the healthcare system that does not pay for healthcare.

It is a huge loss.

Some petty collection costs that pay for themselves mean nothing compared to that.

 

[repoman]

This article from 2015 is before covid and before Trump.

https://slate.com/technology/2015/02/fda-inspections-fraud-fabrication-and-scientific-misconduct-are-hidden-from-the-public-and-doctors.html

Agents of the Food and Drug Administration know better than anyone else just how bad scientific misbehavior can get. Reading the FDA’s inspection files feels almost like watching a highlights reel from a Scientists Gone Wild video. It’s a seemingly endless stream of lurid vignettes—each of which catches a medical researcher in an unguarded moment, succumbing to the temptation to do things he knows he really shouldn’t be doing. Faked X-ray reports. Forged retinal scans. Phony lab tests. Secretly amputated limbs. All done in the name of science when researchers thought that nobody was watching.

That misconduct happens isn’t shocking. What is: When the FDA finds scientific fraud or misconduct, the agency doesn’t notify the public, the medical establishment, or even the scientific community that the results of a medical experiment are not to be trusted. On the contrary. For more than a decade, the FDA has shown a pattern of burying the details of misconduct. As a result, nobody ever finds out which data is bogus, which experiments are tainted, and which drugs might be on the market under false pretenses. The FDA has repeatedly hidden evidence of scientific fraud not just from the public, but also from its most trusted scientific advisers, even as they were deciding whether or not a new drug should be allowed on the market. Even a congressional panel investigating a case of fraud regarding a dangerous drug couldn’t get forthright answers. For an agency devoted to protecting the public from bogus medical science, the FDA seems to be spending an awful lot of effort protecting the perpetrators of bogus science from the public.

 

[southernhybrid]

This article from 2015 is before covid and before Trump.

https://slate.com/technology/2015/02/fda-inspections-fraud-fabrication-and-scientific-misconduct-are-hidden-from-the-public-and-doctors.html

Agents of the Food and Drug Administration know better than anyone else just how bad scientific misbehavior can get. Reading the FDA’s inspection files feels almost like watching a highlights reel from a Scientists Gone Wild video. It’s a seemingly endless stream of lurid vignettes—each of which catches a medical researcher in an unguarded moment, succumbing to the temptation to do things he knows he really shouldn’t be doing. Faked X-ray reports. Forged retinal scans. Phony lab tests. Secretly amputated limbs. All done in the name of science when researchers thought that nobody was watching.

That misconduct happens isn’t shocking. What is: When the FDA finds scientific fraud or misconduct, the agency doesn’t notify the public, the medical establishment, or even the scientific community that the results of a medical experiment are not to be trusted. On the contrary. For more than a decade, the FDA has shown a pattern of burying the details of misconduct. As a result, nobody ever finds out which data is bogus, which experiments are tainted, and which drugs might be on the market under false pretenses. The FDA has repeatedly hidden evidence of scientific fraud not just from the public, but also from its most trusted scientific advisers, even as they were deciding whether or not a new drug should be allowed on the market. Even a congressional panel investigating a case of fraud regarding a dangerous drug couldn’t get forthright answers. For an agency devoted to protecting the public from bogus medical science, the FDA seems to be spending an awful lot of effort protecting the perpetrators of bogus science from the public.

This is why I said in a earlier post in this thread, that the problem, imo, is not government or corporations. It's simply a human problem. Humans can be dishonest and incompetent regardless if they are working in government or private industry. That includes scientists who are often guilty of bias when they do research.