The trouble(s) with American health care

Maha aggregates several recent pieces about American health care well worth reading in detail. But I was particularly drawn to two. the first is about how the Big Drug Companies aren’t the hotbed of medical research they’d like us to think they are, but instead more interested in making a quick buck.

Most of the private health care industry is focused on developing and marketing as many new, patented products as they can. As a result, much product and development research is focused on incremental improvements on those products that have made money in the past. Research that does not hold a promise of new product development, even if it might lead to cures, is shoved aside. [ Free Markets, Health Care, and Innovation ]

That should come as no surprise to anyone who understands the difference between the drug industry and the free market: free markets may foster innovation, but the drug industry is most decidedly not a free market. When you control the means of distribution and barriers to business entry are very, very high you maximize profit by increasing the size of your customer base while spending as little money as possible. Thus:

In some cases private industry has gone from creating products to cure diseases to tweaking diseases to sell more products. For example, the criteria for clinical depression have been so watered down that just about anyone having a bad hair day might fit the diagnosis. [ Ibid. ]

You’ve all seen the ads encouraging you to talk to your doctor about that nagging heartburn or mild depression? The ones that try to convince you that you are sick? Well, that’s the Pharmaceutical companies trying to expand their market. You might not be sick, but with billions of dollars of marketing they can turn us all into a nation of hypochondriacs. And never have to risk money on research that may never pan out.

The institution that can afford to take big financial risks for big potential health care gains is the Federal Government, which is why we should look to our own taxes to pay for things like cancer and Alzheimer’s research.

The other piece I found interesting was the Commonweath Fund’s research on socialized medicine, which she quotes:

According to the survey, 80 percent of Americans have a regular doctor whom they usually see. That sounds pretty good, until you learn that 84 percent of Canadians, 88 percent of Australians, 89 percent of New Zealanders and Britons, 92 percent of Germans, and 100 percent of Dutch respondents surveyed said they had regular doctors. Marcus Welby, M.D., seems to have emigrated.

Okay, but what about the long waits for treatment under single-payer systems? The survey found that 49 percent of Americans said they could get a same-day or next-day doctor’s appointment when they were sick — as opposed to 75 percent of respondents in New Zealand, 65 percent in Germany, 58 percent in Britain and so on. Only in Canada was it more difficult to see a doctor within 48 hours.

Which explains why the “but Canada!” argument is the primary one you hear when you suggest the US ought to socialize medicine. But on the global scale, our health care just doesn’t seem to measure up.