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this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
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Ask Lemmy
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European and UK universal healthcare is able to exist in it's current form and at it's current cost because the US has private healthcare.
Healthcare Companies give heavy discounts to UK/EU to make extra money, they are fully funded by US payors and thus patients. If US healthcare went public and it ate into profits, and other countries run low on healthcare funds (the NHS, right now), private insurance or more likely, increased taxes, in those countries may be required. The NHS is already considering pay-to-play models.
Note: This is a simplification of lots of details around the international transactions and legislation.
Note 2: Before disagreeing, pick a pharma company and look at their annual report.
Note 3: Clarified form and cost based on an astute commenter below.
Medical goods is around ~12% of healthcare expenditures. Even if US (richest country in the world) pays more they would have to pay insanely much more to subsidize single payer healthcare in the rest of the world.
And why would pharma reduce prices in other parts of the world just because Americans pay more? It's not a charity. They charge what the market will bear. Hepatitis C drugs were incredibly expensive because they prevented much more expensive liver transplants down the road. The market would bear a high price then.
Except that a lot of medical research is funded by governments.
It is true that pharma companies couldn't make as much profit if the US had a working healthcare system, but that doesn't mean they couldn't exist.
For the US, a study was conducted on this showing the industry provides a lot more funding than government: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10349341/
And if we look at the UK, NHS spent 453.56 Pounds on all research in 2024 (Annual Report: https://www.nihr.ac.uk/nihr-annual-report-202223), a tiny amount compared to the US, even without taking the huge inflation issues into account, meaning the US is driving that development.
"Couldn't exist" is fair to call out, though, I should have said "in their current form". I mention taxes would have to increase to cover the costs, but I may not have been clear enough.
I have never heard this before. What would be some good things to look up for more info?
@donkeyass@lemmy.sdf.org
How Ukraine started the war, maybe. Perhaps practicing some reading of links that are informative on geopolitics and not the usual propaganda from Globalists.