Profit Keeps Health Care Healthy

Healthy Profit
by R.Durana
(An INESS book)

Profit benefits all whereas deficits and losses punish many. Health care is no exception as Richard Durana's healthy study on the value of profit in health care demonstrates. Entrusting health services to government management or subsidy is a recipe for for deficits and waste. It inevitably leads to regulatory harassment of providers and to the rationing of care. Richard Durana's case for more market in this crucial sector of society is based on solid economic analysis. Beyond economics, there is also a moral case to be made for profits that reward professionals and industries that work towards the common good. Wealth gives them incentives and resources needed to pursue their battle against human suffering and disease. Government regulation and rationing does just the opposite.

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Constricting Growth of Healthcare Stakeholders : A "Simple Formula" for Mismanaged Care

The US managed care industry proposes a "simple formula" for health care reform that hinges on the reduction by 1% of the annual growth of "all stakeholders in the debate" and indicates it has already started working on trimming its own growth (Source: BioPharma Today). Should BioPharma follow suit?

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The ultimate (and noble) mission of BioPharma tech industries is to create products that diminish human suffering. Growth of these industries is mainly achieved by the production and marketing of successful therapeutic products. If you forcefully cut down by 1% the annual growth of Bio-Pharma technology you jeopardize cures of chronic disease in the same proportion and perpetuate the costs of many chronic illnesses. Such a "solution" is not only economically counterproductive (chronic illness is ultimately more costly than cure) it is also immoral insofar as it favors human suffering. As for the managed care industry's vows to reduce its own growth by 1% : one can suspect that this will be achieved by incremental rationing of care and restricting access to cure; a seasoned way of passing on the costs of irresponsible "simple solutions" to suffering patients.

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Patients are the central stakeholders in the health care debate (although for obvious reasons, their voice is not a loud one). Reducing the "annual growth" of the number of patients by 1% can be done in two ways: by curing more patients through growth of Bio-pharma innovation; or conversely by killing more patients by restricting innovation or rationing access to cure. The US managed care cartel seems to have made its choice!

Grèves médicales et cancer bureaucratique

La grève est contraire à la tradition médicale. Elle traduit des frustrations profondes de professionnels exacerbés. Grèves et manifestations n'existeraient pas si l'intrusion de tiers ne venait pas perturber le contrat Hippocratique qui regit tacitement les rapports entre médecins et patients dans un marché libre.

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Aujourd'hui, le médecin ne peut plus se contenter de soigner ses patients. Il doit également combattre une bureaucratie pathologique qui l'empêche d'exercer correctement son métier. Malheureusement les grèves de médecins sont le plus souvent menées sans analyse étiologique. En s'attaquant au symptôme Couchepin, les meneurs du movement actuel de protestation FMH en tête, ne s'attardent pas suffisamment sur les questions morales soulevées par la réglementation arbitraire de notre profession. Nous n'avons pas encore saisi l'enjeu d'une bataille d'idées qui oppose l'Etat et ses saprophytes à ceux qui se battent pour une société plus lbre.

The Hidden Cause of "The Crisis of Capitalism": War Destroys Capital

Exactly a year ago, in March 2008 Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, estimated the global costs of the US military adventure in Irak at $3 trillion and predicted that this would severely harm the US economy. Stieglitz was being optimistic. He did not foresee that when the finances of the first industrial nation of the world collapse, a domino effect on all industrial partners follows.

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War does not produce capital. It creates suffering and destruction. In past times, these were mainly circumscribed to warring states. Globalization has changed this. Peaceful countries are punished almost as harshly as military ones.

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Wars are ruinous ventures that no nation can afford but that only states can launch. It is unfair and incorrect to blame the current woes of world finances on a failure of capitalism. They are the consequence of carefully encrypted war economies of nations heavily involved in military quagmires... Our economic crisis stems from eight years of hard state destructive action in places such as Irak, Afganistan, Gaza, Georgia... Further state action to correct it (eg. by printing paper money to fill the the financial craters caused by war) will only make this crisis worse.