Growing demand and the cost of health care are stretching the budgets not just in Massachusetts, but all over the world. Governments everywhere are faced with a stark choice: leave the health care system as it is and face rising taxes and declining quality of care, or start to do things differently.
Towards this end, many nations and states are resorting to sweeping legislative reforms. The hurdles faced by Affordable Care Act in the US are a reminder that improving health care through ambitious legislation can be protracted, complex, and highly contentious.
Comments
This is one of the most refreshing articles on healthcare reform. If every healthcare system is good at managing certain diseases, then it may not be the healthcare system that needs the fix, but the way every healthcare system manages a diseases. The players in US are mostly domestic or local (hospital chains, insurance, payors, HMOs, retail pharmacies etc). Pharmaceutical and medical device industry ae probabaly the only global players and Daniel Vasella based on his internaional experience brings new perspective to the table. Nicely written
So will Dr Vasella's company begin reimbursing the taxpayer for the basic research that makes his companies profits possible? Will his company begin charging American consumers the same prices they charge in Europe? Will he support ending the ban on Medicare negotiating bulk discounts on drugs? Somehow I don't think so.
Afer raises good questions. I think pharmaceutical companies should price their drug as a measure of that nations per capita GDP. So no country would overpay and there would be a sense of justice. But for this to happen countries should stop reference pricing. One minor point is that the cost to operate in US is high. Companies pay billions of dollars in legal settlements in the US, while they do not in other countries. It would not fully account for the price difference, but we have to appreciate that. Paying for benefiting from the academic research is a moot point. We all benefits from many things provided by public money. So should all companies pay for roads, police, judiciary etc. I dont think so, as long as the company pays tax. Plus many pharmaceutical companies are questioning the reproducibility of academic research. For example, Amgen found that 47 of 53 "landmark" oncology publications could not be reproduced. So should goverment pay Amgen for misleading them?