I agree with one statement, that “However you fund healthcare, from public funds or private funds, it costs money”. I believe that, under the current “non-system”, total healthcare costs are greater than they need to be, for a variety of reasons but none more significant than the more 40 million uninsured and countless others under-insured. A plan that includes a public option will help intercept problems before they require expensive solutions.

I’d also draw your attention to an exchange in the British Medical Journal 04/05: Response to: Foreign free riders and the high price of US medicines by Donald W Light and Joel Lexchin

It is the drug companies that make people think that their huge R&D budgets are devoted to “innovation,” when most of it goes to developing or testing new molecules discovered by others. An example of such claims is found on the PhRMA website: “America’s research-based biopharmaceutical companies are committed to continuing and expanding innovative research and developing new and better medicines and treatments.” Such statements create quite a different and misleading impression than can be supported by the facts we cite including our analysis which shows that the pharmaceutical industry devotes a net of about 1.3 cents per dollar of sales to basic research.

NIH basic research contributes much more to discovering valuable new drugs than Reilly and Smith indicate, because that research identifies the most promising biological targets. Without them, drug companies are like someone in the dark with a large ring of keys (the millions of molecules in their data banks) but unable to find the keyhole

However you fund healthcare, from public funds or private funds, it costs money — doctors, nurses, technicians, administrators need to be paid, buildings and equipment costs money, new treatments cost money, etc. Government funding just means that our tax dollars are used to pay for this but those same tax dollars could be used for other things — roads, schools, bailing out automotive companies, etc. If you believe that providing universal health coverage is a good thing (and in the absolute moral sense it certainly is) and if you believe that at some point taxes cannot be raised any higher then you will be faced with two problems — setting priorities among various government programs and ultimately rationing health care. It is simply impossible to have infinte health care — for everyone, at anytime. It is time for people to understand that, understand the trade-offs that have to be made and live with the consequences. We as citizens seem to want everything but we are not willing to live with the consequences. All we seem to try to do is point the finger at someone who is the blame for this. It’s not anyone’s fault that we don’t have infinite resources but it is our leader’s fault that they aren’t honest with us and tell us that. The public/private debate is essentially that the private sector is very explicit about this trade-off, certain conditions are not covered, some treatments are too high risk, etc, the government covers this by having poor quality service, lower quality products, long waiting lines, etc. (Have you talked to anyone who lives in Canada or the UK and needs say, a hip replacement — how about a 1 year wait?) Finally, why all of a sudden is there a newfound confidence in the ability of the public sector to provide health care efficiently? Medicare and Social Security (neither tainted bu “private greed”) are certainly two examples of how poor government programs could be. I would much rather be able to select my own physician and my own hospital than have a massive (and expensive and in-efficient) bereaucracy run this thing.
So, stop the shouting and finger pointing and start thinking.

http://triangle.bizjournals.com/triangle/stories/2007/06/25/story1.html

Harold Martin is also on the Blue Cross board. He’s now the chancellor of NC A&T — also state funded, by the way.

Charlie Sanders is now chair of the board at UNC Health Care.

And Ken Lee is with Hatteras Venture Partners, which was started by UNC Chancellor Holden Thorpe and his brother with Golden Leaf money that they have basically wasted.

What a joke.