Even if you zoom in on the few countries most people are talking about when they say "the rest of the world," there's still a tons of issues present, a lot of which are directly a result of the system that they chose to utilize. This is an issue with a lot of nuance and I wish people wouldn't make such reductive statements like this.
I find this argument not only provably less relevant than the poster thinks is is, but also it's not much different from dying as you can't afford to pay even the copay for your cancer treatment. The USA can't even sort out decent healthcare for children, who haven't yet had the opportunity to get a job to pay for their healthcare.
No healthcare system is perfect but that's not a reason to not seek something better, fairer and more efficient.
Sure, the US system isn't perfect by any means, but one reason why it's so expensive is they throw everything plus the kitchen sink at patients. And this is even for Medicaid which covers the poorest Americans.
Having lived in 4 different country with 4 different healthcare systems, if I got diagnosed with a serious cancer you can damn well be sure I'll get treated in the US. I have a friend who got diagnosed with breast cancer who did the same, moved back to the US and with ACA subsidies was getting the latest therapies with a monthly premium of $200. And the drugs she received weren't even paid for in her home country.
I genuienly don't think that's as common as you think it is.
Anecdote time: when my dad was diagnosed with GIST in Poland(you know, not a very wealthy country), his prognosis was about 6-12 months if lucky. But the doctors at the oncology unit knew that the drug Glivec was being approved against GIST but not yet refunded by the Polish healthcare system. They basically applied and got approved to fund his therapy along with 5 other people(GIST was and remains super rare). The national healthcare system paid for his treatment with Glivec for the next 8 years(until he died), despite the huge cost of the medication.
Like, maybe he was lucky. But again, I think you are misrepresenting the system by saying "doctors won't even try". Sure, maybe some won't. Some will. I've heard similar stories from US where doctors won't order certain medically necessary treatment because they know insurers won't pay for it - it doesn't mean anything in isolation.
And that’s what I’ve observed. Yes, in universal systems you’ll get cancer care, but you’ll get the standard of care from 5-10 years ago. All the while cancer can has advanced by leaps and bounds.
The "everything plus the kitchen sink" approach isn't ideal in all scenarios and the US healthcare system has a high level of overtreatment, often with potentially harmful interventions. It also pushes up the cost for everyone.
However there are economic models that provide for a high level of universal healthcare equal to what the US has now and also cost less than the US spends right now. The difference is that is moves from a combination of clear personal cost and obfuscated public costs, to purely public costs and many in the US seem opposed to that relatively minor shift. It also means the politicians are even more responsible for their society's healthcare and I imagine many of them don't want that responsibility.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cancer-su...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-gdp-pe...
I’m genuinely curious and realize this is one of those topics that is easy to come across as combative, but please know that’s not my intent.
The reason I ask is that I think roughly 40% of healthcare R&D globally is funded by the U.S. For its size, the U.S. scores relatively high on the access and quality dimensions, but as has been discussed is quite bad at cost. I wonder if the US has optimized for quality and access at the expense of cost.
I have also heard from those in the field that the US effectively subsidizes other countries costs through their R&D and price policies. E.g., other countries may have tight drug price controls and the only way pharma is willing to invest in R&D is because they can make up those profits in America.
It really makes me think all this discussion about one country’s healthcare vs another is myopic. Just like many other aspects of economics, healthcare to a certain extent is a global system.
The healthcare industry has a lot of working parts, all of which require scrutiny, even in these mythical places of which you aspire American healthcare to look like. There's genuinely negative outcomes as a result of the policy decisions everywhere, too.
[0] https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/Why-Canadia...
America's healthcare system is terrible, but socializing it like other countries have done isn't going to solve the problem (root causes include a massive shortage of doctors, a norm of bundling insurance with employment, lack of pricing transparency, partially socialized healthcare, as described in the article, and a system in which it costs a billion dollars to get a drug approved).
Even having an insurance can mean that it will take months to see a specialist.
And universal healthcare doesn't have to mean that there shouldn’t be any private health care. The Nordic countries have solved it this way.
Europe hasn't solved healthcare at all, there's plenty of issues ongoing and developing but the average joe need not worry of going broke due to medical bills so he can focus his life on other things.
Problems of national health systems in other countries are not "globally" visible like insane bills for Americans.
Just go and read up how many British people are nagging about NHS. I expect that there is shitload of corruption in health care in other countries as well but I don't read or speak German or French.
In Poland I heard about case of a doctor that died from overwork, she just collapsed because she was working 3 shifts for a month or something. Don't get me started on emergency crews that are treated like dirt and hired on as B2B contractors.
Well I am not going to get a bill that will ruin me financially but I might end up with no professional health care to help me when I am in trouble because they don't get paid enough and are worked to the ground.
Us British people are nagging about the NHS because we've had 10+ years of a wannabe-GOP running it into the ground in order to stealth-privatise it and bung billions into theirs and their corrupt chums' pockets.
We love the NHS. We don't love austerity and corruption.
Private healthcare also suffers from poor governance (it's one of the big factors in why the United States' healthcare system is so expensive) but its effects aren't quite as drastic.
As an aside, the NHS is indeed flirting with instability right now, but that is due to multiple Tory governments arguably putting policies in place to destabilize and privatize the NHS in the long term. It’s as bizarre as Brexit to me that the British voters are going with it. But there it is.
I don't see that argument as refutation of my argument :)
Because party you don't support is running the system does not mean that when party you support it will get better. I don't believe any party has that much influence over what is happening in health care anyway or is able to fix it.
When you have so many facts demonstrating that government-funded medicine works just fine everywhere else, the only hypothetical worth considering is whether it would work here too.
The rest of your point notwithstanding, this is a statement whose explanation could almost be its own converse -- companies can afford to profitably sell a drug for less than $50k elsewhere in the world because they're allowed to milk the USA money cow (i.e., marginal costs are low, fixed costs are high, and there exists a guaranteed market to cover the fixed costs). Without further evidence that the fixed costs could be covered as well it's entirely plausible that the proposed alternative (that the drug company would exist, make the drug, and sell it for a reasonable price worldwide without further subsidies/intervention) would never come to be.
Such evidence probably exists, but an argument whose truth depends wholly on orthogonal statements isn't worth repeating.
Because it seems to me that the price difference is so large, sometimes by a factor of 10 or more, that it doesn’t seem worth it to bother going through the approval process in any other country and yet pharmaceutical companies do so. So the NPV must be positive even when the price is lower.
I also think if there were drugs that only exist because of high US drug prices that we would hear about them. Proponents of the exorbitant prices would be yelling from the rooftops about some specific miracle compound that was only possible to develop because of their tireless work at finding new and exiting ways to price gouge.
Instead all I hear are these hand wavy arguments about research costs and whatnot. Where’s the beef?
The approval process is O(1%) of the total cost of development.
> I also think if there were drugs that only exist because of high US drug prices that we would hear about them
Maybe. I've grown wary of reading too much into the relative popularity of different phrases and arguments; it turns out people are complicated and prone to prioritizing points you might not care about, and even when those arguments are being made they often get lost in the noise of 8B other people.
Humira probably isn't a bad example in any case (though without being inside a company it's hard to know for sure since you don't know if, e.g., they would have prioritized international approvals and sales if the US market couldn't be lucrative). Total international sales only eclipsed total R&D in the last few years, despite the drug having been around for a couple decades. I personally think the current level of price gouging for Humira in the US is excessive, but AbbVie would also have had to take a loss on it for nearly 20yrs without some level of price gouging somewhere.
[1] https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/new-drug-cost-research-de...
I genuinely don't know what people want here - drugs aren't magically summoned into existence for free. If you want new drugs, someone has to cover the cost and the prices that the non-US world pays aren't nearly high enough to do that. You could lower the prices for Americans, but only if you simultaneously increase the prices for everyone else, too.
> Altruistic enough to...
There's no altruism involved. US consumers are willing to pay those prices (inelastic demand), and companies are able to charge them (lack of competition, legal barriers). Predicated on that fact, marginally it's also profitable to manufacture for other countries as well, but if the rest of the world didn't exist you'd still expect to see the current behavior.