Have to eat my words

[UConn James]

... the fact that there is truly no long term testing.

 

Not true!

 

What about when they announce, "Hey, you know that medication that was approved 10 years ago? Turns out it harms people more than helping them! Our bad."

[molson_golden2002]

The government has no role in subsidising health care, because THAT DOESNT LOWER THE COST OF HEALTH CARE. We need to look into things that actually reduce the cost of healthcare.

It does have a role and it is expanding. Health care costs are rising for many reasons, not just research and development. If people get sick, old or hurt they should be taken care of whether than can afford it or not. Anti-government ideolouges can't seem to grasp the immorality of their postion on this.

[jjamie12]

If people get sick, old or hurt they should be taken care of whether than can afford it or not.

Are there any limits to this statement in your position?

[molson_golden2002]

Are there any limits to this statement in your position?

Yes

[jjamie12]

Yes

OK. What are they? I'm trying to get an understanding of your position before I agree or disagree with you.

[JimBob2232]

It does have a role and it is expanding. Health care costs are rising for many reasons, not just research and development. If people get sick, old or hurt they should be taken care of whether than can afford it or not. Anti-government ideolouges can't seem to grasp the immorality of their postion on this.

 

Give me some more of your reasons. My reasons are

1) High cost of R&D

2) Frivolous lawsuits

3) Marketing

 

Yes, there are things the government can do to help reduce the cost of health insurance. #1 is the lawsuits. Loser-Pays is a good way to settle this debate. High cost of new prescription drugs could be reduced by lengthening the length of time the patent is valid for.

[Chilly]

Most of these lawsuits aren't frivolous. A Harvard study in 2006 revealed that:

 

We found that only a small fraction of claims lacked documented injuries. However, approximately one third of claims were without merit in the sense that the alleged adverse outcomes were not attributable to error. Claims without merit were generally resolved appropriately: only one in four resulted in payment. When close calls were excluded, claims without evidence of injury or error accounted for 13 percent of total litigation costs.

 

Our findings point toward two general conclusions. One is that portraits of a malpractice system that is stricken with frivolous litigation are overblown. Although one third of the claims we examined did not involve errors, most of these went unpaid. The costs of defending against them were not trivial. Nevertheless, eliminating the claims that did not involve errors would have decreased the direct system costs by no more than 13 percent (excluding close calls) to 16 percent (including close calls). In other words, disputing and paying for errors account for the lion's share of malpractice costs. A second conclusion is that the malpractice system performs reasonably well in its function of separating claims without merit from those with merit and compensating the latter. In a sense, our findings lend support to this view: three quarters of the litigation outcomes were concordant with the merits of the claim.

They found that in other cases, actual errors did NOT result in payment or other results:

 

However, both of these general conclusions obscure several troubling aspects of the system's performance. Although the number of claims without merit that resulted in compensation was fairly small, the converse form of inaccuracy — claims associated with error and injury that did not result in compensation — was substantially more common. One in six claims involved errors and received no payment. The plaintiffs behind such unrequited claims must shoulder the substantial economic and noneconomic burdens that flow from preventable injury.33,34 Moreover, failure to pay claims involving error adds to a larger phenomenon of underpayment generated by the vast number of negligent injuries that never surface as claims.

 

The system is slow and expensive, just like anything else run by the Government. However, the cases which are going to trial are far from "frivolous", and most of the cases without errors are being weeded out before trial.