@152. BC: – … Where then exactly is all this money going to not to the hospitals and their staff? Everybody has pet theories, but no hard data, and the hospitals themselves make finding out very difficult…
There’s no mystery if you do a tiny bit of digging and use a little common sense, BC. But you’re obviously NOT INTERESTED in hard data. You only want to demand it of others.
$3.7B revenue on ONE DRUG in only 9 months!!!? And for a drug that didn’t even work as advertised!!??? HELLO!!???? (Side note: the Zetia study also demonstrated that there’s no link between reduced cholesterol and reduced heart disease – a fact which reporting on the study has handily obfuscated. Cholesterol is to heart disease as humans are to global warming.)
Multiply that $3.7 BILLION in revenue by the hundreds of drugs peddled directly to consumers on T.V. and in magazines. Go ahead – try it. Now you have a tiny inkling of how much of our money is being poured into the coffers of the pharmaceutical industry after the insurance industry takes its sizable cut. And be careful to note that I’m not talking “profit” here – just enormous waste and overpricing, all made possible by the fact that there is NOTHING working to keep a lid on the cost of drugs.
Ask yourself this: how the hell do you think the pharma lobby can absorb an $80 BILLION reduction in revenue without blinking an eye? And why do you think the pharma lobby was willing to pour $150 MILLION into socialized medicine propaganda for the privilege of ONLY reducing their extortion by $80 BILLION? Are you completely blind, or just willfully blind?
If you had even the slightest brush with how these drugs are prescribed, day-to-day, using “standards” of care that are functionally equivalent to “oh, let’s try this one – everyone else is taking it”, you’d have some small notion of what’s going on. You don’t. Stop pretending you do.
And what in the world makes you think money isn’t going to hospitals and their staff? Want to know where else our money is disappearing? Check some of the salaries here (p.3). These are average starting salaries for these specialties:
Obstetrics/Gynecology: $332,297
General Surgery: $368,544
Orthopedic Surgery: $613,291
Otolaryngology: $410,505
Urology: $465,933
Cardiology: $583,171
Neurology: $299,615
Oncology: $494,714
Pulmonary Critical Care: $378,947
Gastroenterology: $500,313
Anesthesiology: $388,808
Radiology: $595,833
Price increases encouraged by resource pooling – via the abuse of group comp. insurance policies – have made these kinds of salaries possible through constant, open-loop increases supported by a broken health care market. These people would never in a million years be able to demand this level of income if they had to rely on a free market and a direct relationship with the consumer to set their compensation.
Interposition of the insurance company, which has no motivation to keep costs down (since they just keep raising premium rates and only benefit from the increased cash flow) makes these salaries possible.
And don’t forget – each of these specialists needs a staff to support them. Those folks aren’t making the same killing M.D.s are, but they’re still at the upper end of the nation’s salary range (see p.2).
Get a life BC. You’re too smart to waste your time trolling for socialism.
