So I had to get an operation done on my cat. It was just a tooth pull, but it's a cat so the poor boy had to be put under while it was done.This made the procedure far more involved than it would have been for a human, and we don't have health insurance on the cat. This means that we had to spend a bit over 500.00 to get the tooth pulled, and we found out he needed a 30+ dollar prescription for antibiotics.
Ack! 500 all at once for one cat tooth! I wish I had insurance! I would have paid twenty a month just so that when things like this come up they don't hit all at once. (We charged it. We'll have to spend small amounts per month paying this off for a while, so we will not be paying all at once anyway, but darn it! There's a principal to this sort of thing.)
Ack 30 some dollars on an antibiotic? Well, actually that's not all that bad. Come to think of it, last time I was in the hospital for something that I had to go under for it cost more than 500. I wonder why cat health is so much cheaper. It's pretty much the same things being done, only I'll do what the doc tells me and I don't have a tiny body.
Well, let us say I need some medicine. Let us pretend that it takes a quarter to actually make the medicine, but if you add R&D, labor, and shipping you have to add several dollars. This makes the drug inherently worth like five bucks by the time it gets to me.
Now to get the medicine to me the drug company needs insurance, the prescribing doctor needs insurance, and I need insurance. Each time you add a middle man you need to pay a little extra because these people's time is considered valuable. This adds to the cost of the drug.
OK, so now add a government agency to the mix to make sure I have insurance. This is one more person, and it adds to the inherent value of the drug.
So now let us say that the drug is worth 50 bucks. It only cost about a quarter in materials, but a lot of people have spent time to make sure it is the right drug for me. This labor cost means that the drug really IS worth 50.00 and not 0.25.
But I have insurance. They'll pay for it. But where do they get the money to pay for it? ME! But what if I am low income, or otherwise don't have to pay thanks to some universal health care exemption / loop hole. Well the drug company isn't simply going to eat 50.00 they're going to add the cost of my medicine to everyone who does have to pay.
Who is that exactly? Well the wealthy only make up a small percentage of the people who need medicine. The upper 1% of the economy only makes up 1% of the population believe it or not. The majority of this extra cost will go to the middle class.
But wont drug costs go down since we no longer have to pay for the uninsured? No. We haven't magically made it so that people who couldn't put money into the system before can now. You think it was the wealthy who couldn't afford insurance? Noooo. It was the poor people who STILL are poor.
Only it's worse now. We aren't simply paying for the medical bills of the people who can't afford it. We're buying insurance for the poor. Think about that. We're paying someone else to pay for the medical bills of the people who can't afford it. It's worse than that. We're also paying taxes to make sure that the bills of people who can't afford it are paid. Think about that.
Bill needs 50.00 to buy meds. Ed pays Tom 60.00 to pay Bill 50.00. Ed THEN pays Joe 5.00 to keep an eye out to make sure that everyone pays who they are supposed to pay.
But back to my cat.
Bailey doesn't have prescription drug coverage. He doesn't have to go through drug companies and massive regulations. There's still some labor costs involved, but we can get his meds from another country if we want. All in all I feel much better about his vet bill after I've compared the cost to what a human would need.
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