On Jul 23, 1:07*pm, wrote:
On Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:21:52 -0700 (PDT), Frogwatch

wrote:
With all the consideration of the govt being the party that sets
medical prices at Canadian levels, who will pay for the R&D? *Most R&D
for med stuff is done in the USA because we pay for it and essentially
the USA subsidizes Canadian medicine because they do NOT pay for the
R&D, US citizens do. The govt will not pay for it and are not even
qualified to do so. *Most advances in medicine and drugs over the last
50 years would never have been funded by the govt. *I know from
personal experience that govt experts rarely know enough about what
really works.
Most medical R&D is funded by pvt companies who know they will make
money if the process works. *If they cannot make a profit, no more
R&D, no advances in treatments, no new drugs.

The only way to cut the cost of medical care is to cut jobs and
downgrade the salaries of the people they keep. Nobody says that.

A blog made the point that 1960s era medical care would be extremely
cheap these days but we do not want that, we want 2009 medical care.
In other words, what we pay for medical care provides funding for
continuous advances.
Some people will reply that the govt should fund such advances but
they are not able to. The only way to fund real advances is thru
people willing to risk large amounts of money on risky (in terms of
success, not to the patient) technology.
If an insurance policy was available for little money that said "We
will only pay for medical care using technology available up to 1995",
how many people would take such a policy only for care?
Unfortunately, if we want continuous advances in medical care, then
costs will continue to rise, it MUST. As the population ages, they
get more and more wrong with them and new technologies are expensive.
I do not know the solution to this problem.
When people think that drug prices far exceed the costs of R&D, they
do not factor in the costs of drugs and procedures that failed but
cost huge amounts of money. Furthermore, R&D is really expensive. It
is a joke in the R&D world that you should produce the most reasonable
budget you can and then multiply it by Pi (3.1415...). However, it
has been my experience that even this is too low and I always end up
spending 3X more than that even. Unfortunately, if you are doing it
under a govt fixed fee contract, you can never justify up front to the
budgeting officer why the costs will be this high because you can
never identify the sources of these increased costs beforehand,
otherwise it wouldn't be research.