Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Health Care Debate (by Fatima)

Lauren, Kelley and Sara's presentation on Health Care debate was especially interesting and insightful in many aspects. I come from a country where the private sector health care is very limited in nature, and most people have to make do with the universal health care which is of very poor quality.Here in the USA, the private sector health care is flourishing and I know many of my family friends that either wish to come to USA to get medically treated, or wish to come here to study so that they can become successful doctors in the US. I believe that even though it is very hard to justify that why a 70 year old woman would not get treated just because she cannot afford it, it happens to be the inevitable truth that the private sector health care is driven by monetary incentive. This incentive leads to a much higher quality of health care provided to citizens.Today, some of the diseases that have been eradicated from the world such as small pox, are due to the fact that private companies had monetary incentive to come up with wonder drugs. To simply analyze this issue from a cost-benefit analysis perspective, it does not make sense for a pharmacuetical company to spend so much time and effort in creating a new drug other than them having a moral imperative towards the public.

(Professor Prenkert's Comment: Fatima's Blogger account is messed up, so her posts are going to be showing up under my name.)

1 Comments:

Blogger mel said...

I agree with Fatima in that companies need monetary incentives in order to keep researching drugs and such, but I think the problem is that there is no external check on the industry at all. Perhaps it is the fact that the book I read for my book review had to do with a whistleblower in the pharmaceutical industry, but I find myself pretty disgusted that the pharmaceutical companies can be so corrupt and upfront about being in it for the money. (One example that particularly bugs me: Using knowledge gathered from indigenous peoples to find new medicinal uses for plants without compensating the source of information at all) So yes, I think that monetary incentive is necessary for the continuing development of health care advances, but I think it also needs some sort of check. This could only come from the government, and I can't think of a single way that would be effective at ensuring moral and ethical yet productive pharmaceutical companies. Any ideas??

8:40 PM  

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