In article , Joe from Kokomo writes:
I watched a CNN film called "Unseen Enemy", a non-political documentary
about the potential for world-wide pandemics from various diseases, the
flu, h1n1, SARS, Zika, Ebola, etc, etc.

Not at all mentioned in the film but what *is* political is that
trumpo-the-Clown's proposed budget is *cutting* funding for medical
research and funding for the National Institute of Health. Brilliant!

I suppose I should keep my mouth shut since I work in the health
care industry and have from time to time in the past provided
services to medical researchers even though they are not the ones
paying my salary.

But just a tiny bit of a counter argument, and certainly not one
my employers would agree with: if we fund research that is then
given away free to the rest of the world, we are subsidizing with
taxpayer dollars health care that the rest of the world will not
have to pay for. I.e., very low payback on the taxpayer's dollar.

Similar reasoning applies to Big Pharma. It costs so very much
to develop a drug that we have our system set up to allow the
pharmaceuticals to charge high prices in order to pay back those
costs _by passing them on to Americans who become ill_ while
charging much lower prices to the rest of the world. In that
case it is to some extent charging what the market will bear,
and God knows that affordable AIDS treatment, for example, is
extremely important to the third world. But what happens is
that we pay the full price of the drug (although our insurance
companies may have negotiated a discount so they pay somewhat
less), while, far ahead of schedule, many other countries are
paying "generic drug" prices even for drugs for which patent
protection has not expired and for which generic alternatives
are not yet available.

I'm not apologizing for excesses of Big Pharma in that second
case, just pointing out that our system is set up to have
America's health care researchers and pharmaceutical industry
subsidize everyone else.

How to fix it? Well, in this world of globalization we do
try to assure that everyone pays their share. But it is
very easy to get caught up in the idea that so much of the
world cannot pay for state of the art health care and we should
pay for their free ride. Not a bad idea except that we are
just a small proportion of the entire planet's population, and,
wealthy as we are, cannot continue subsidizing everyone else
forever.

And even if we did have agreements that everyone would pay their
own way we would still have many refusing to follow the rules,
and they just might choose to violate patent rights on a massive
scale so that they can sell cut rate versions of products for
which we - and that means the American public - had to pay
dearly in terms of up front costs as well as in of having to
pay full sticker price after the fact, except for the
relatively small discounts previously noted for the cases
where an insurance company is paying the bill. (Not that
any government insurance programs pay their share of the
medical bill, but that's a bit of cost shifting I won't even
try to venture into).

Just my opinion, and if it coincides in any extent in any with
that of my employer it will astound me to the same extent that
it astounds them.

George

Elect a clown, expect a circus.

trump -- an embarrassment to the country, a danger to the world