Fix pharma: price caps. Take away the massive profits that make the bribery, the revolving doors, the captive agencies possible.
One problem is that there is simply too much money in the system: it sucks in about $13,000 pp/year in 2021 or 18% of GDP, despite the fact that outcomes are poor.
Did I say poor? They are horrible, and imho it is in part because of all the money to be made in healthcare. All the incentives are wrong. If your doctor or hospital or system keeps you healthy, it goes out of business.
Washington always sees this as a bean-counting problem, and all you need to do is throw money at it, or let the insurance industry write the laws, and we can call it good. But what if it is a professionalism problem? The esprit de corps is gone. The spirit of the doctors and nurses has been destroyed because they are no longer allowed to do the right thing, within the system.
Tomorrow doctors like Pierre Kory, who was a champ at saving the lives of the sickest patients (and tonight is telling the CDC what it needs to do if it wants us to trust it), talk to Bobby Kennedy about what they think needs to happen. Alternative doctors, a chiropractor, Mikki Willis and Del Bigtree (who critique medicine through film and TV) and the founder of Millions Against Mandates will share their perspective.
Personally, I think we need to make Scientific Misconduct a crime. It isn’t. You can lose your government grant if your own university finds you guilty, but they almost never do. No one goes to jail for lies in medical journals that might lead to many deaths—in fact no one sees the inside of a courtroom, because these things are not real crimes—yet.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1747016119898400
Let’s see what everyone else has to say. Tuesday 7 pm ET June 26 (tomorrow). You have to sign up for the zoom.
First make pharma liable for the safety of their products. No liability can only lead to massive abuse, injury and death. This is a no brainer and anyone that thinks otherwise is not living in this world.
“Personally, I think we need to make Scientific Misconduct a crime. It isn’t.”
I had no idea this was the case, and I cannot believe it isn’t prosecutable as fraud!
What do we need to do to make this happen?