At first I thought you were being casually racist by implying that the person who invented those wheels must have been a refugee from Cuba, then I thought, maybe he’s just saying we should drop the inventor into Havana which is fairly poor and isolated and they’d never get out, which is still sorta racist, but maybe…

A viable plan might be to regulate things going forward, rather than backwards. With a few exceptions being made for company mainstays like tylenol or valium, This will lead to a gradual fall in revenues, but hopefully still enough for companies to remain viable.

The companies designed to meet the cost aren’t necessarily at fault. They’re behaving as they should as per the market. But let’s not pretend that they’re consumer advocates, because in the end, it’s easier just to incrementally raise prices.

And yet, their prices couldn’t be met by the market in a real scenario. They’re beneficiaries of a socialist system.

The problem with your scenario is that if we shut down private insurance overnight, you’d probably have a fiscal crisis in healthcare where hospitals, vendors, providers would collapse under their own weight. When the dust cleared maybe we’d have a better starting point but the actual collapse would be catastrophe.

If you’re referring to residency, they get paid and it only lasts 3 years.

I have several doctors in my immediate family. They started making pretty decent money reasonably early compared to others in my family with graduate degrees. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

Please spare me the self righteousness. If you can’t understand the distinction between what you believe someone deserves and the amount the market pays them then you don’t need to be in the discussion.

You’re mixing up two different things, one is your perception of “desserts” the other are economic realities that are really an anomaly. That they “can” or they “should” is a moral/ethical question only they have to answer. What I’m telling you, is that their livelihood is an economic reality based on a bloated,…

Sorry, that entitles them to live fat because their business isn’t subject to the same market pressures as the rest of us? I mean.... good for them, but their level of intelligence is hardly novel even at their level, there are a bunch of smart people that didn’t go to medical school that don’t pull 500k.

I’m not arguing specifically against Libertarians. I’m kind of fighting the indignation you sometimes get when you say, “hey, these fuckers are parasites”, because they somehow deserve their billions because they create drugs. They certainly deserve to compete in a fair market, but that’s not what’s happening. It’s a…

Assuming tuition costs more or less correspond to salary range - because they’re specializing or focusing on something - then 160k debt to an expected 170k to 180k in compensation, is probably around 10,000 per month in realistic take-home pay, depending on state. Assuming the payments for that debt are around 2000…

Forest for the trees friend. All of that outcry, has no bearing or impact on the thousands of other drugs being priced into the stratosphere. Nor does it impact the structures that allow branded drugs to price very high during their initial patented phase.

My point is that the amount of time you spend at school, or even the social good you are doing, doesn’t guarantee a good salary. Doctors spend a lot of time going to school, but the reason they earn high salaries has nothing to do with their hard work, it has to do with the mechanism that allows them to charge high…

Singapore heavily regulates prices for healthcare. If you want to institute that in the US, I’ll be all aboard savings plans. Also, the government subsidizes a lot of healthcare costs.

Republicans don’t want people to die on the streets, they’re just REALLY dumb, and most of them can’t be bothered to get a little bit of an education, so instead they rely on “common sense” which is great for cooking and yard work, but falls down everywhere else. The dumbest thing is they seem to be proud of their…

I’d feel bad for people like you if you weren’t ruining America.

I broke my knee and femur in 1996. I was in the hospital for about 3 months in traction, 2-3 months in a body cast, 4-5 months in therapy and years to finally run comfortably again. Thank goodness for my excellent doctors 20 years later I’m almost 100%. We didn’t pay much because we had great coverage, but even back…

Isn’t the old economist joke something about a “round cow in a vacuum?”

Yeah, fine. But here’s how the discussion goes. There’s a public outcry, they fix that specific instance...sorta, but ignore the fundamental problem, because a real solution at the VERY LEAST involves government regulation, which is a four-letter-word with the freedom caucus, and in a best-case scenario ends with the…