Why are we brainwashed into thinking that research scientists will work any harder to find and produce a cure, if their paycheck comes from a private individual instead of the public, or if the equipment and facilities they use are owned privately instead of publicly?
Healthcare is a public good and must be wholly owned by the public. There’s no benefit the public gets from it being yet another capitalist enterprise. If the public can’t match private funding (a dubious claim given how much the public already subsidizes this private property) then the funds should just be obtained elsewhere. From military funding, police funding, and from wealth taxes.
Even the argument that private market profit motive in necessary to drive innovation in health care seems wrong. One of the biggest areas of health care innovation driven by profit motive is pharmaceuticals, where the free market is propped up by intellectual capital laws to make the profit motive work. And even then it’s been an mitigated disaster of high prices and an opioid addiction epidemic.
I think they’d care if they were made aware that their insurance and taxes were covering drugs that are $300k/yr on average and often only marginally or perhaps no more effective than cheaper ones that are already available. Obviously those people are blind to orphan diseases to begin with because that’s the only way they could possibly stan for private insurance. “I’m healthy and like my insurance. I don’t see what the big deal is.”
