Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As much as I hate socialism, the only solution appears to be Single Payer. The problem is, "How do we establish a market that provides medication to patients who may not be able to afford it while still generating enough profit to allow research and development of new drugs 10 years from now?" Establishing a monopsony doesn't actually solve this problem. It changes the flow of money slightly[0], but it doesn't actu…
If the US bargained with drug companies on more even footing with other countries, we might not get stuck footing such a disproportionate fraction of the bill (R&D and otherwise). > Health insurance in the US already is much more like a monopsony than most people realize. Dead wrong, Medicare part D is hobbled so that the US is not even close to being a half-monopsony, let alone a full monopsony, in the drug market.…
That's an odd way to phrase it, because it implies that the amount of research being done globally is constant. But it isn't; it's driven by the available funds.
This actually proves my point: a disproportionate amount of the research that happens globally happens in the US[0], and that's because there's enough profit in the US market for companies to conduct that research. If that profit is reduced, then yes, it's possible that the short-term prices would decrease, but at the cost of delaying further discoveries and advances in medicine.
That's not an easy tradeoff to make, precisely because it's unclear which choice benefits patients more. It's a much easier choice for a country that has a small population, or for a country that doesn't contribute that much to the global R&D (because the impact would be smaller), but the US is in neither of those two categories.
> Dead wrong, Medicare part D is hobbled so that the US is not even close to being a half-monopsony (let alone a full monopsony) in the drug market.
I'm actually not referring to Medicare Part D with that footnote, but that's a separate discussion.
[0] The US's share has dropped in the last decade or so, but only because China and India have become even more lucrative.