The Waste of America's Health Care System in 1 Chart

[Steelgrave]

those would be meth babies.
no joke.

Yeah, meth is big in Oklahoma, sad to say.

[Windigo]

yet drug use deaths seem to not be terribly out of line. 1.5 per 100 000 in US versus 1.1 in Sweden for example..... IMO high infant mortality associated with drug use is a bit of a red herring on life expectancy

I suspect that poor lifestyle choices and limited availability of health care to the poor has more bearing


http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/drug-use/by-country/

ya nimrod, poor lifestyle choices like crack and meth and limited healthcare because your money goes to drugs.
and to that being impoverished because you cant hold a job because your high.

drug use rates in the states are not terribly out of line with other western nations so your point is moot - there are other factors at play

[MetalDog]

yet drug use deaths seem to not be terribly out of line. 1.5 per 100 000 in US versus 1.1 in Sweden for example..... IMO high infant mortality associated with drug use is a bit of a red herring on life expectancy

I suspect that poor lifestyle choices and limited availability of health care to the poor has more bearing


http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/drug-use/by-country/

ya nimrod, poor lifestyle choices like crack and meth and limited healthcare because your money goes to drugs.
and to that being impoverished because you cant hold a job because your high.

Personal responsibility is lacking in a lot of people and their choices. Considering several other factors including environment, opportunity, and mental capacity, to name a few, some of them don't really have a chance.  And how do you determine who they are and how far do you go to help them? 

[GDS_Starfury]

yet drug use deaths seem to not be terribly out of line. 1.5 per 100 000 in US versus 1.1 in Sweden for example..... IMO high infant mortality associated with drug use is a bit of a red herring on life expectancy

I suspect that poor lifestyle choices and limited availability of health care to the poor has more bearing


http://was.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/drug-use/by-country/

ya nimrod, poor lifestyle choices like crack and meth and limited healthcare because your money goes to drugs.
and to that being impoverished because you cant hold a job because your high.

drug use rates in the states are not terribly out of line with other western nations so your point is moot - there are other factors at play

Its the type of drugs in play not over alluseage.

[LongBlade]

Its the type of drugs in play not over alluseage.

There is also the question as to whether each country defines infant mortality identically.

[Staggerwing]

Eh? Dead is dead, no?

[LongBlade]

Eh? Dead is dead, no?

In theory.

But infant mortality tells us a lot less about a health care system than one might think.  The main problem is inconsistent measurement across nations.  The United Nations Statistics Division, which collects data on infant mortality, stipulates that an infant, once it is removed from its mother and then "breathes or shows any other evidence of life such as beating of the heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord, or definite movement of voluntary muscles... is considered live-born regardless of gestational age."16   While the U.S. follows that definition, many other nations do not.  Demographer Nicholas Eberstadt notes that in Switzerland "an infant must be at least 30 centimeters long at birth to be counted as living."17   This excludes many of the most vulnerable infants from Switzerland's infant mortality measure.

source: http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA547ComparativeHealth.html

[Jack Nastyface]

As I think I / we have stated before...admittedly access to primay care in US is a determining factor in higher than expected infant mortality rates.  Although I can't quote the study now, I believe one review in 2010 showed that something like 20% of expecting mothers did NOT see a primary care provider for a healthy pregnancy check-up between confirmation of pregnancy and childbirth.  So any high-risk preganancies that may have been identified via a check-up are going to get missed and influence that number.  It is a sobering reflection that when you consider that approximately 70% of all conceptions miscarry, and another 30% of pregancies end in miscarriage, modern medicine still hasn't addressed the precariousness of a healthy birth / healthy baby.
I am not confident that access to affordable primary care would change that statistic...at least for the short to medium term.  I don't know ANY primary care doctors who would refuse service for an expecting mother who couldn't afford the office visit fee, and those very few that might refuse service would almost certainly know of a care provider office that would perform the check-up on a pro-bono basis.

Also fwiw...in general in the health care industy, we don't tend to include crack / oxycodin / meth / heroine addiction etc into the "therapeutic lifestyle choices" category.

[Windigo]

yet drug use deaths seem to not be terribly out of line. 1.5 per 100 000 in US versus 1.1 in Sweden for example..... IMO high infant mortality associated with drug use is a bit of a red herring on life expectancy

I suspect that poor lifestyle choices and limited availability of health care to the poor has more bearing


http://was.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/drug-use/by-country/

ya nimrod, poor lifestyle choices like crack and meth and limited healthcare because your money goes to drugs.
and to that being impoverished because you cant hold a job because your high.

drug use rates in the states are not terribly out of line with other western nations so your point is moot - there are other factors at play

Its the type of drugs in play not over alluseage.

fair point... never went that far, did notice that meth use is mentioned as being higher than average in the EU nation of Czechoslovakia

[GDS_Starfury]

that was where the Blue was going.

[FarAway Sooner]

So, on the question of US pharma companies' research bankrolling other countries, help me understand something.  If pharma companies enjoy very consistent and extremely high profitability margins in the US, then why are they complaining about their extraordinary R&D expenses?

It seems to me like you'd spend R&D money until the anticipated marginal return on that next $$ of investment was < the opportunity cost of doing something better with that money.  I get how higher margins on your product would goose more in investment.  But if they were in a truly competitive marketplace, wouldn't they have to invest so much in R&D that it ate further into their extremely high profit margins?

I've never seen data on how much US companies plow into R&D versus non-US firms, but the notion that their extraordinary profitability is justified by the extreme R&D layouts they have to maintain misses the point.  Investment as a % of Revenue is one metric, but if they're left with plenty of earnings even after R&D, doesn't that indicate that they're getting their great margins somewhere else?

I'm a Finance professional and I always feel like there's some real obvious point I'm missing here, but I'll be danged if I can pinpoint it.  Anybody know what I'm missing?

[Mr. Bigglesworth]

So, on the question of US pharma companies' research bankrolling other countries, help me understand something.  If pharma companies enjoy very consistent and extremely high profitability margins in the US, then why are they complaining about their extraordinary R&D expenses?

It seems to me like you'd spend R&D money until the anticipated marginal return on that next $$ of investment was < the opportunity cost of doing something better with that money.  I get how higher margins on your product would goose more in investment.  But if they were in a truly competitive marketplace, wouldn't they have to invest so much in R&D that it ate further into their extremely high profit margins?

I've never seen data on how much US companies plow into R&D versus non-US firms, but the notion that their extraordinary profitability is justified by the extreme R&D layouts they have to maintain misses the point.  Investment as a % of Revenue is one metric, but if they're left with plenty of earnings even after R&D, doesn't that indicate that they're getting their great margins somewhere else?

I'm a Finance professional and I always feel like there's some real obvious point I'm missing here, but I'll be danged if I can pinpoint it.  Anybody know what I'm missing?

The petulant child will cry that it can't play with all the toys.

[LongBlade]

So, on the question of US pharma companies' research bankrolling other countries, help me understand something.  If pharma companies enjoy very consistent and extremely high profitability margins in the US, then why are they complaining about their extraordinary R&D expenses?

It may sound strange but you're going to need to put yourself into something of a sympathetic mind to get the answers.

Not every drug researched pans out. I don't know the statistics but far more drugs fail than succeed. And you don't know a drug will fail until you've spent money looking into it.

How many decades have we been researching a cure for cancer? Life expectancy has gone up for most every form of cancer but we still don't have a cure. Somebody has to pay for that research or it won't be worth doing.

[airboy]

So, on the question of US pharma companies' research bankrolling other countries, help me understand something.  If pharma companies enjoy very consistent and extremely high profitability margins in the US, then why are they complaining about their extraordinary R&D expenses?

It seems to me like you'd spend R&D money until the anticipated marginal return on that next $$ of investment was < the opportunity cost of doing something better with that money.  I get how higher margins on your product would goose more in investment.  But if they were in a truly competitive marketplace, wouldn't they have to invest so much in R&D that it ate further into their extremely high profit margins?

I've never seen data on how much US companies plow into R&D versus non-US firms, but the notion that their extraordinary profitability is justified by the extreme R&D layouts they have to maintain misses the point.  Investment as a % of Revenue is one metric, but if they're left with plenty of earnings even after R&D, doesn't that indicate that they're getting their great margins somewhere else?

I'm a Finance professional and I always feel like there's some real obvious point I'm missing here, but I'll be danged if I can pinpoint it.  Anybody know what I'm missing?

You are missing the failure rate of drugs in clinical, animal, and human trials.  You must pay for all costs as a company or you go bankrupt.

Many drug companies have gone bankrupt or have been merged out of existence for a couple of simple reasons:
1] They had too many failures of drugs in trial
2] They stopped putting money into research (a huge expense) and ran out of new drugs that were under patent protection.

[Labbug]

The rate of a drug getting to market is at best one in ten.  Even if a drug gets to market, it may end up being withdrawn because of adverse effects that only show up once it is used in a large population.  The total number of people used in the clinical trials to develop a drug is usually between 10,000 and 20,000.  These numbers are much lower for cancer drugs and orphan drugs.