[ExI] My prediction

[John Clark]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2026 at 4:51 PM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:


> *>>…Let me see if I've got this straight, after you studied those 3 lists
>> you concluded that the way the USA handles healthcare is better than the
>> way any other country in the world does, even though it spends FAR FAR more
>> on it than any other country on planet earth and yet 47 countries have
>> longer life expectancy than the USA….*
>
>
>
> *> John, there is a lot more to life expectancy than the quality of
> healthcare. *
>

*Per capita Canada pays about $6000 a year on healthcare and Canadians have
a life expectancy of 82.9 years, the USA pays nearly $15,000 a year on
healthcare and Americans (who are members of the same species as Canadians)
have a life expectancy of only 79.6 years; and you think that example, as
well as 46 other similar ones, in no way indicates that there's something
fundamentally wrong with the US healthcare system and instead maintain that
the American way of doing things is the best way in the world. Spike, can't
you see that's crazy?  *



> * > An example: pharmaceutical companies invest enormous sums to get a new
> medication thru the approval process to gain access to the highly
> profitable US market.  They can’t charge as much outside the USA because
> companies will just figure out what is in the medication and make their own
> knockoff.  Here we have strong intellectual property rights which prevents
> that.  Consequence: our drugs cost a lot more here, a looooot more. *
>

*Come on Spike! That excuse is absurd, with all your experience at finding
them you should be able to do better than that. There's so many things
wrong with the above it's hard to know where to begin, but I'll try: *

*1) How on earth can charging Americans and only Americans ridiculously
high prices for drugs prevent foreign companies from "making their own
knockoff"?!  What can and has prevented that is strong international patent
protection that has been in place for well over a century and has been
proven to be very effective. *

*2) Foreign companies don't need to "figure out what is in the medication"
nor to figure out how it's manufactured because both of those things are
about as far from being secret as it's possible to be. Even our quack
Secretary Of Health is not crazy enough to approve a drug whose composition
and manufacture is kept secret ..... or at least I don't think he's that
crazy. *

*3) Many of the world's most popular drugs, such as the weight loss drug
Ozempic, were developed outside of the USA by foreign companies, and yet
those drugs still cost much more in the USA than they do anywhere else. *

*The real reason drug prices are so ridiculously high in the USA is because
every developed country on this planet, with the exception of the USA, uses
their government's bargaining power to negotiate drug prices, and that
gives them enormous leverage. But in the USA the law specifically forbids
Medicare, the largest drug purchaser, from negotiating drug prices; and the
private insurance market is fragmented so they have little or no leverage,
and the additional administrative costs from the complexity of the
multi-payer insurance system also significantly inflates healthcare
costs. **Therefore
the drug companies are able to say to Americans, and only to Americans,
"pay me or die".    *

*>>… eliminate the one remaining subsidy that slightly helped Americans pay
>> their astronomically huge medical bills….*
>
>
>
> *> It was called the Affordable Care Act.  It failed John. *
>

*What are you talking about?!  In 2014, just before the Affordable Care Act
(a.k.a. Obamacare) took effect, 48 million Americans were uninsured, by
2016, only 27 million were uninsured. Obamacare wasn't the wholesale
restructuring that our healthcare system so desperately needs, but it was
certainly better than nothing. And since 2014 Republicans have said that
they have a plan that they will be announcing in just a few weeks that
would be much better and much cheaper than Obamacare, but it's 2026 and
we've still not seen the slightest sign of it.  *


*>>…It's not just Albania you need to dismiss with a wave of your hand,
>> there are 46 other countries that get FAR more out of their healthcare
>> dollars than we do…. John K Clark*
>
>
>
> *> Again, you assume a correlation between quality of healthcare and life
> expectancy. *
>

*And you are assuming there is NO correlation between quality of healthcare
and life expectancy. Which assumption is more ridiculous? If your
assumption is true then there would be no point to medical research, or to
building hospitals, in fact there would be no point in doctors existing. So
I think my assumption is less ridiculous than yours. *

*It's amazing how loyalty to a political ideology can make someone ignore a
patently absurd situation, like spending vastly more on healthcare than any
other country yet have the 48th longest life expectancy, and continue to
insist that we should just keep on doing things exactly as we've always
been doing things. But now that I think about it, these days isn't that
what being a "conservative" is all about, just keep on doing the same old
thing? *


*John K Clark*
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