Hello, this is a newsletter published two to three times a week, every Monday, Wednesday, and most Fridays. It goes over novel arguments to Democratic talking points and how to effectively utilize them with friends or strangers on Facebook. If you enjoy this content please consider forwarding this email to someone who you think might as well, if you’re here from a share please consider subscribing to get this content delivered to your inbox two to three times a week.
While it has died down in recent months universal healthcare has been a staple issue for Democrats the last half decade. While the easiest route to go is “this is an issue you only care about during election years” there are plenty of issues with it you can throw at them that they won’t know how to handle.
The USA subsidizes the rest of the worlds healthcare. Why is our healthcare so expensive? Because due to pricing laws pharma companies can’t make money pretty much anywhere else. So many of these systems liberals point to are only possible because we are essentially paying the difference of a free market. The other issue though is most innovation comes out of the USA. One great example is Harvoni the cure to Hep C. For a few years it was about 100k a dose but completely unavailable outside of the USA. Had the rest of the world not had their pricing controls this drug could of been priced far lower here but if the USA had the same price controls Harvoni would likely not exist.
We would be condemning tens of thousands to die. Right now the hottest thing in the pharmaceutical industry is what’s called orphan drugs. These are drugs that treat or cure extremely rare but deadly diseases. These are diseases that 30 years ago if you were told your child had it it would be a death sentence. Today if you live in Europe and get diagnosed with one of these diseases, if the medication isn’t being exported yet, it is still a death sentence. Since the number of people with these diseases is incredibly small the only way for these companies to make a profit is by charging very high amounts per dose. The average cost of getting one of these drugs completely FDA approved is currently $1,000,000,000. One good counter argument is if we want pricing to go down we could drop that billion dollar bill to get a drug approved. Right now if a company gets a drug 80% approved and fails to get approval that is a $800 million dollar bill they need to spread across other drugs. Oh and it ensures if a drug doesn’t make billions and billions then it won’t be made.
We’ve heard this story before. A little background on me I was very liberal when I was younger. When I was 19 and 20 in the early portion of Obama’s first presidency I went door to door to help him get elected. We were told Obamacare would make the rich “pay their fair share” and the worlds largest corporations pay more so EVERYONE could have ready access to good healthcare. This is not what wound up happening. Health insurance increases were largely placed on the middle class and small to mid size businesses. While the uber-rich and Fortune 500 companies saw virtually no change in their cost. Arguably Obamacare was the largest corporate handout in the history of this country. Not only did the revenue and profit of these companies explode but their actual profit margin rapidly expanded, some insurance giants by 300%. But now we are supposed to believe these same people are going to reform it again and its not just going to be a huge hand out to these same corporations? I don’t buy it, especially when you look at how much they donate to the DNC.
When liberals argue they have two goals, one to walk away feeling smug, and two to prove you’re a bad person and they are good. These above reverse this on them. If you show you know more about the approval process of drugs and the “why” behind pricing is so high they will have a hard time feeling smug. Then when you point out things like orphan drugs, and that to get their way they are willing to condemn tens of thousands of people with orphan diseases to die is hardly something I would call compassionate.
Then they will go to their final line of defense. “Well I have a plan and you don’t so come up with something better or get out of my way” you could use the “nothing is better then what your proposing” but I found coming up with a free market system a better counter argument. A major issue with pharma pricing today is that generic manufacturers are just taking 10% off from the name brand and calling it a day. Rather then dropping their price to near cost level like in theory they should. So what I generally argue is that we create some kind of organization whether it be an NGO or a new government agency 100% dedicated to manufacturing generic drugs and not selling them for anymore then cost of ingredients and running facilities. Then also change how these patents work from “20 years from time of submitting” to “10 years from time the drug hits the market”.
This line of argumentation has many benefits. It would fix most of the cost problems within the system. It would still leave companies the incentive to make ground breaking drugs because they can charge crazy amounts for novel drugs while they hold the patent. The system would be able to more easily pay for these drugs via insurance since older drug pricing would plummet. It would stop incentivizing companies to play patent games to sit on decades old drugs they can charge insane amounts for. Lastly this should be a system Democrats should love. It would fix the problem, it would make healthcare affordable, and it can even be done through government. The reason they’ll argue against this though is because it won’t increase the governments control over your lives like universal healthcare would. It leaves the free market in place. But the more they try to argue against it the easier it is to pick them apart and show their concern with healthcare has a lot less to do with healing people and more to do with increasing control.
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