It's a financial crisis expected to explode in the next 20 years as baby boomers join the ranks of senior citizens, who consume the lion's share of pills. With about four retirees for every active employee, GM is a harbinger of the problem the United States will face in coming years.Other industrialized nations have also negotiated price ceilings with pharmaceutical companies, something else the corrupt US Congress has failed to do.When a year's supply of some cancer drugs costs more than a $50,000 Cadillac DTS, General Motors and the rest of the country have a problem.
2006-09-28
Another Argument for Universal Healthcare: Corporate Health Costs Reducing Profits
GM complains that healthcare costs are having a huge effect on their bottom line. A single-payer healthcare system would reduce or eliminate this problem allowing them to pay higher wages to their workers and still make a substantial profit.
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Some industrialized nations have "universal healthcare". But as we learned yesterday, some have not, including two that got voted by business leaders as having a better business climate than the US.
A universal healthcare problem certainly would not solve GM's problem. Rather it would spread a "universal" economic problem throughout the US, and would reduce the overall quality of the US health industry. The two tiny nations (each about 15% the size of the US) who beat the US on that poll (but didn't last year) have managed to create an attractive business climate. But one of them taxes its citizens 60%! We will see how long these business leaders vote in favor of that country!
Nadir, you seem to think that "universal healthcare" means "free healthcare." Do you believe that the massive, "cadillac" health plans that GM, Ford, and Crysler workers won for themselves decades ago can actually get spread out to all 300 million Americans? How much do you reckon that those plans cost per employee? Let's say $2,000 per employee & dependant. Where will $2,000 per 300 million Americans come from? Especially when they don't have to work, save, and sacrifice to obtain that $2,000?
Singapore and Switzerland, who got out-voted by the business leaders in that poll, surely set a better example here. Maybe the US could afford a "universal" healthcare plan if as large a fraction of its population productively applied themselves in high school, producing a population of super-qualified, industrious people. But we have an enormous burden human sleep-walkers and street-walkers for whom the rest of us -- not them! -- will have to purhcase bypass surgeries, cancer drugs, diabetes treatments, acne creams, etc.
Here's what I'm willing to pay for with my tax dollars: thousand dollar cash payments for any US resident willing to get a vectemy or tube-tie, and the operation.
"Currupt US congressment"? For opposing pharmaceutical "price ceilings"? If I was a congressman I would oppose "price ceilings" on everything, even petro and water during a natural catastrophe. Would that make me currupt? Is cash payment the only possible reason that somebody outside the pharmaceutical industry could oppose price ceilings?
How about congressional opponents of school vouchers: have they been paid off by the enormous teacher's lobby? Or maybe by the KKK, whose members surely don't want poor black kids to have $10,000 vouchers to attend private schools!
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