Breaking Bad....Only in America

[Aractus]

You do understand that I am not American don't you?

Apologies my friend!

Whilst I'd agree on the pharmaceutical side there is the whole insurance side to this too. That is huge business with huge profits that appears to spend enormous sums on getting out of insurance claims.

Essentially its a screwed up system where private enterprises put profits ahead of patient care.

There's no such concept of "patient care" at a gas station or a supermarket, that concept applies to doctor's surgeries and to pharmacies.

As someone who grew up with the NHS I find it mystifying that Americans think Healthcare should be in private hands. To me it is the same as education or defence and has to be a public service.

I'll re-state what I said earlier. While this is correct, America already squanders the healthcare money that would be required, and thus they cannot afford to implement universal healthcare AND to continue the wastage. I actually don't know too much about Obamacare, but what I do know is that what should have been done is to begin national healthcare reform by cutting the wastage, and that is done by setting up new government health departments specifically to address the areas that need improvement, doing cost-benefit analysis and then implementing the reforms and changes required to get the system running efficiently for money.

To go back to what I was saying about the subsidies on pharmaceutical medication, the way you could do this is have a 6 year plan: year one, decrease the government subsidies on all over-the-counter drugs by 50% and set up a govt. department to investigate and initiate reform into these medications, years two-four: legislate to phase out all subsidies on all over-the-counter drugs from any store that is not a pharmacy, and restore 100% subsidies of over-the-counter medications sold from pharmacies, investigate the subsidy levels drug-for-drug and their cost-benefit for future reform. Years 5-6: Legislate to remove over-the-counter drugs from being should outside of specialized pharmacies.

There's a huge reason for removing drugs from non-pharmacy stores. Pharmacies are the ones that need to get the profit from those drugs so that they can employ knowledgeable trained pharmacists!! Also, pharmacies in Australia are even known to sell complete pseudo-medical shit like earwax candles, so I really dread to think about what products pharmacies in the USA may have to peddle to make an extra buck!