Still Supporting Sanders? You’re Gonna Die (Broke), by Karl Denninger

From Karl Denninger, on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:

It just never ends.

There are a lot of innumerate people in this nation, or worse, those who are just lazy. Maybe they’re drunk, whether on booze or the “Obama’s gonna pay my gas and mortgage!” nonsense that political charisma gins up, or perhaps they’ve had a few too many tokes on a pipe. Doesn’t matter, really.

What matters is that elections have consequences. In the case of Sanders, his plan for “medical reform” will go nowhere, mostly because he won’t be able to pass it if elected. And, frankly, I don’t think he’s electable.

If you want to know how well socialized medicine works in the United States, go ask a veteran about the VA. Make sure you’re well out of range of thrown missiles first.

The “dream” of Medicare for everyone is just that — a dream. Government interference in the health system, to the tune of one trillion dollars a year, is why we have the problems we have today. It is that willful and intentional blindness to the acts of the entire industry, acts that are illegal virtually everywhere and, I suspect, could be prosecuted here as well if anyone in the government gave a damn, that leads to the majority of bankruptcies in this country — a majority that are caused by medical debt.

There are those who say that a free market doesn’t work. Really? Then why is it that in a free market medical system, right here in the United States, I can have a cardiac pacemaker implanted, with the device, for $11,400. That’s not a guess, it’s a quote, just like it would be to change the brakes on your car. Now try to get that price from your local “non-profit” or “for-profit” hospital. Best of luck; you won’t be able to do it.

$11,000 sounds like a lot of money, but is it really? Not compared against the $50,000+ that your local hospital charges for the same surgery. Or, you have an inguinal hernia repaired for $3,000 — in the same place, for cash, all-in, including the mesh. Again, try getting that price in your local hospital. Good luck.

The real ball-buster is that even these prices are massively inflated, as are drugs. The latest outrage that is being trotted out is Martin Shkreli, who had the termerity to smirk at Congress this week. Dr Manny is “outraged” that he did so, and that he hiked the price of a drug by 5,000% to make money.

Why is Martin smirking? Probably because Gilead does the same thing every day, but nobody is proposing to throw their executives in prison. Sovaldi, sold in the US for Hepatitis C and an actual cure, costs $90,000 for a course of treatment. The very same drug is under $5 a pill in India; a course of treatment is 90 days, approximately, meaning that the very same drug is $450 there.

Shkreli did indeed hike the price of a drug by 5,000%, or 50x. But Gilead sells their drug here for two hundred times what it sells for in India, not 50.

There are 330 million of us and about seven and a half billion souls on the planet right now. We literally pay the check for all of the drug and device development in the world. Everyone else uses it for free. This “system”, really a racket, only works because these companies have managed to get the US Federal Government involved in pointing guns at you and threatening to throw you in prison if you fly to India and fill a suitcase full of Sovaldi, then bring it back here to the United States to sell it.

But for those laws the math on this is simple.

If there are 7.4 billion people on the planet (latest estimate), and we’re 330 million of them, then we’re about 5% of the earth’s population. If a huge proportion of the planet (e.g. Pakistan, India, etc) gets the drug for under $2,000 (and it does) then were we to simply remove said special protections and instead prosecute anyone trying to restrain free trade in said drug the price would rise materially in places such as Pakistan (e.g. it might double) but in the United States it would plummet like a stone to some 5% of what it costs now, or approximately that same $4-5,000.

To continue reading: Still Supporting Sanders? You’re Gonna Die (Broke)