The good Samaratin works 80 hours a week and has 3 small children.

"DakotaT" wrote:

He trusts King Herod to do the right thing cause he's tired.

"DakotaT" wrote:

"DakotaT" wrote:

And at the same time you say health care is a luxury, that doesn't jibe with a want for universal health care.

"dingus" wrote:

Governments are capable of doing great things for their constituents

"dingus" wrote:

No offense is intended Non, I hope you know that.

"dingus" wrote:

By the way, pack93z, my argument is that it's the very abuse of comprehensive health insurance plans that makes it so difficult for people who really need prolonged are, like yourself, to obtain it. That's why I said people who need better access should be advocating for less comprehensive health insurance -- thereby less unnecessary demand -- rather than more.

"Nonstopdrivel" wrote:

The Role of Federal Research and
Development

The federal government spent more than $25 billion on
health-related R&D in 2005. Only some of that spending is explicitly related to the development of new pharmaceuticals.
However, much of it is devoted to basic
research on the mechanisms of disease, which underpins
the pharmaceutical industrys search for new drugs.
The primary rationale for the government to play a role
in basic research is that private companies perform too
little such research themselves (relative to what is best for
society). In general, the information generated by basic
research can be readily replicated at low cost. Thus, many
of the benefits of that research accrue not to the company
that performs it but to the public and to other firms.
With pharmaceuticals, those spillover benefits can be significant
because the development of new drugs depends
on scientific advances. Federal funding of basic research
directly stimulates the drug industrys spending on
applied research and development by making scientific
discoveries that expand the industrys opportunities for
R&D.
Government-funded basic research can also stimulate
private-sector R&D indirectly. By supporting graduate
students and postdoctoral researchers in academic labs
where basic research is conducted, federal grants help to
train many of the researchers who are hired by drug companies.
That training enhances the productivity and profitability
of the companies R&D investments, while also
allowing researchers to command higher salaries.
Given the extent of federal funding for life-sciences
research, however, there is a risk that some of that funding
could crowd out private-sector investment in R&D.
In general, the government tends to focus on basic
research, whereas private firms focus much more on
applied research and development. That difference
diminishes the risk of direct crowding out. But the distinction
between basic and applied research is not well
defined, and the division of labor between the two has
become less pronounced as the potential commercial
value of basic life-sciences research has become more
widely recognized. Government and private R&D efforts
have sometimes overlapped (as in the race to finish mapping
the human genome); thus, the government may
have funded some research that the private sector otherwise
would have financed. Identifying specific cases
where direct crowding out has occurred is difficult, but it
is probably most likely to happen when the government
funds research whose potential commercial applications
are obvious and valuable.
Federal R&D spending can also crowd out private spending
indirectly by causing labor costs to rise. Although students
and postdoctoral researchers form part of the workforce
for federally funded research, the government and
the drug industry both draw on the same supply of
trained professional researchers. That supply is relatively
fixed in the short run, and higher R&D spending in
either sector can cause salaries to rise by increasing the
demand for researchers. That is more likely to occur
when R&D spending is growing rapidly. In recent years,
both real (inflation-adjusted) salaries for biomedical
researchers and total employment in biomedical research
have increased along with real R&D spending. When
R&D spending is growing more slowly, however, there is
probably little such effect on labor costs for professional
researchers.