It has always been clear to me that free-market healthcare is a failure. It is a danger to your personal economy, your health, and your survival. Many see statements like these as hyperbole. It is not. When titans of finance tell you this in no uncertain terms, maybe you should listen.
The wards of the free-market healthcare industry pointed out in no uncertain terms that the patient is not that important. It’s green that matters. The interesting thing about it is that they are not even hiding it.
CNBC reported the following.
Goldman Sachs analysts attempted to address a touchy subject for biotech companies, especially those involved in the pioneering “gene therapy” treatment: cures could be bad for business in the long run.
“Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” analysts ask in an April 10 report entitled “The Genome Revolution.”
“The potential to deliver ‘one shot cures’ is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies,” analyst Salveen Richter wrote in the note to clients Tuesday. “While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.”
The article went on to point out a reality about curing hepatitis C and its impact on corporate profits since curing it would mean fewer people getting infected.
GILD is a case in point, where the success of its hepatitis C franchise has gradually exhausted the available pool of treatable patients,” the analyst wrote. “In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients, thus the incident pool also declines … Where an incident pool remains stable (eg, in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.”
Is there any doubt that free-market healthcare only applies to cures that ensure continued cash flow to corporations? It is clear that free-market healthcare is a failure and that monied interests are vested in not having cures for diseases lest their bottom line is affected.