A logical proof about how we ended up in this mess
Toby Rogers: Pharmaceutical companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits.
By law, company directors and executives can and should be removed from their positions if they fail to maximize profits.
No one disputes this. This is true for all corporations but in the case of the pharmaceutical industry it leads to the death of nations.
Curing disease is not profitable.
Treating chronic disease is where all of the money is to be made.
Causing chronic disease increases profits further.
Therefore, by law, pharmaceutical companies are in the business of treating and causing chronic disease, not curing disease. more
Took the words right out of my mouth!
This is silly. Pharma is not required by law to cause disease. That they do so to make money can be argued, but not because the law says they have to. You can’t break one law (don’t create a plague and kill people with it) and then claim you aren’t guilty because the law says you must maximize profits. There is a reason pharma is trying to hide what they do to avoid liability.
It goes further than that.
With our current healthcare structure (which is still better than Canadia or UK), the end user isn’t price-conscious because insurance pays for nearly everything. We don’t know the price of an operation, of medication, of a doctor or hospital visit – because we don’t care, because we don’t pay it directly. But of course we all pay indirectly, through increased costs. And hospitals and doctors don’t post their prices. Insurance companies are especially motivated by 0bamacare to pay HIGHER prices – because their overhead is capped at 20% of their total, they actually WANT the prices to be higher. We need to return to a purely capitalist system, in which we can choose to get ‘catastrophic’ insurance to cover the rare incidences when we have high costs, but which costs far less than current insurance. And we pay out of pocket for all of the basics – and become more aware of costs, more willing to shop around, which drives prices down. Because the hospitals are financially raping us right now. It isn’t the insurance companies that are at fault, although they are complicit. It’s the hospitals, fueled of course by government regulation.
Totally unrelated
Raquel Welch dead at 82.
Just look at the Weimar Republic (Germany, 1920-1930s) and the partnership that emerged between Hitler and German industrialists. That worked out well, if you were Hitler.