Regulation & Finance Sector Pay
By Barry Ritholtz - July 8th, 2009, 12:30PM
Nice couple of charts that show correlation between what occurred when financial markets were deregulated and the outsized compensation packages that subsequently followed.
The book does a nice job showing how one led to the other — that there was both Correlation and Causation.
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chart via NYU
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Here is a similar chart, with major regulation/deregulation included (I seemed to have lost the WSJ link — if anyone has it handy, please let me know!):
via WSJ
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Source:
Wages and Human Capital in the U.S. Financial Industry: 1909-2006∗
Thomas Philippon, New York University
Ariell Reshef, University of Virginia
December 2008
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~tphilipp/papers/pr_rev15.pdf
July 8th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
I read (or heard?) somewhere that executive pay in the financial sector was approximately 400 times that of the average worker compared to 40 times back in the late 70’s/early 80’s. Has anyone heard this or have evidence to support this?
July 8th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
Kudos, Barry! This is a gold mine for me! I’m teaching the US from 1960 to the Present in Aug/Sept, and deregulation/free market fundamentalism will play a large role in my course. This is a great help.
July 8th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
not related:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/
Barry Ritholtz, in his new book Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy writes, “The iconic image is the American cowboy. You can picture him on a cattle drive, wearily watching over his herd. All he needed to get by were his wits, his horse — and his trusty Winchester.”
July 8th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
One thing I’ve often wondered about is whether we have a sufficiently “open” system that permits foreign banks and securities firms from competing for business, whether in M&A, divestitures, IPO underwriting, etc. I don’t know the answer, but my feeling is that a few of the big U.S. players (e.g., GS) have the system “rigged” to keep many of the foreigners out.
July 8th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Hopefully we are getting closer to the time when the professional class decides that selling out is not a very good long term strategy. The people at the top are there for good reason. Give them an inch and they will take it all. As long as the professionals underneath are complicit in all their creative scams (by scooping up the crumbs falling off the boardroom tables), it is what it is.
Can there be one lawyer who does not understand the realities and corruption in the legal system? How many CPA’s do not understand the fraud that defines corporate America and the US government? How many doctors (my own profession) do not understand the travesty that the corporatisation of our health care system has wrought?
How could the professional class have sold out so easily? When will the leadership of the professions finally stand up and say, “enough is enough!”
July 8th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
“…That’s where the money is…” Willie Sutton
July 8th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
It is simple graft, once removed to disguise the fact. Laws were changed that allowed certain people to profit at public expense.
Done directly, it would be illegal; done this way all the perps are ‘blameless’. Do we have a Congress or do we have a gang?
July 8th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
Would be interesting to see the level of Financial Service Industry political contributions superimposed on this. That’s where the money went.. first.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/White-House-hospitals-reach-apf-4134590509.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=main&asset=&ccode=
White House, hospitals reach deal on health care
…This will go down in history as the greatest mistake of the first decade of the new millenium. Read the article. It sounds like it is dead before it even comes up, but the elements that Obama is putting together will not mesh into any kind of coherent plan. My suggestion is forget this boondoggle until after the 2010 elections, do your best to get out of the recession without massive new government spending and higher taxes, and put this together for 2011, if something reasonable can be found. This is not it. When Joe Biden says “we must get this done by August”…please remember that a very similar statement was made by our previous treasury secretary and Big Ben. Now it is July, the program that was passed was good for investment banks and pork, but huge portions of the bailout were ill- conceived, as is this plan.
B in T
July 8th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
The finding isn’t very surprising, as one should reasonably expect the two factors to be interdependent, although it’s cool to see it presented that way.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
BinT – but as a physician, what is your position on health care reform? I only get the pharmacists viewpoint at home, I’m curious what you think.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
And also, B in T — do you believe that there is a problem at all in the American health care system, with the uninsured approaching 50% of the population?
If so, please expound on how you would change things to provide for a larger fraction of the population to receive health care above that of a banana republic.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
I think healthcare is too expensive…even our group grumbles about the insurance costs for the salt mine…however, it appears to me that should an Obama-like plan become enacted that very soon we will be a public-only financed healthcare system…and when that happens what you eventually take home as care will be dependent on government bureaucrats…not a happy thought…today when you are denied some form of payment or coverage, you can bitch to the insurance company, and there are state insurance commissioners who will also go to bat for the individual. No one will go to bat for you on a national scale like you do with your individual policy…it will not happen…trust me on this.
If we forsake private plans because of the expense and accept what Uncle will give us, then you will see rationing and delays. I have done residencies at 2 VA hospitals and rotated through another in medical school, and have seen people from other countries who were referred in to our craniofacial program from other countries in private practice and listened to their stories and troubles…..we will give up a lot for the sake of costs…if costs are too oppressive and no other program other than a public funded plan is conceived, then expect our national plan to work similarly to the VAH. It just happens…
July 8th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Thor @ 2:32
One of the things that Obama wants to do is to crimp the wages of the specialists (cardiologists, dermatologists, surgeons, etc.). I’m guessing “B in T” isn’t enthusiastic about that.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Its grossly misleading when Michael Moore goes to Norway to illustrate socialized medicine. The country has about 4 million people and the longest North Sea coastline. The highest proportion of NS oil to population of any country. Hell yah they have great free health care. The Netherlands makes out on the NS/pop metric too. England on the other hand, now is a net oil importer, and pissed away what money it did make. Needless to say their health service sucks. They put heart patients on a waiting list for an angiogram. You can’t get much more dysfunctional than that!
July 8th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
constantnormal @ 3:26
No one argues that there aren’t a lot of problems with the health care system.
The #1 issue (IMO) is how to expand coverage without also increasing costs dramatically.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Constant:
First I would change the other big cost…social security…I would make each individual’s contribution his and his alone…starting tomorrow.
Second I would make government pensions 401k’s…like everyone else.
Third I would disagree with you that health care coverage is a right, that just because you are born that you get coverage. I don’t agree with that line of thinking. I want better coverage than a banana republic will give me, and I am willing to pay for it. I don’t want VA care, or medicaid care, or British care. I want something better than that.
Constant, what is it you want your government to provide for you? Seriously, not trying to be a snot, what is it? How would you treat 100% of the United States, and pay for it, and not deny state of the art services to those who were fat, or smoked, or whatever?
July 8th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
DL,
Or cutting services. My 84 year old parents are consuming hundreds of thousands a year. You have to ration and means test. There is no way today’s boomers get that much health care essentially free. We’ll get to where someone like my mother would already be gone and my father would at best be missing a leg, instead of a couple of toes.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
@Bruce
Google “blue shield rescission.”
July 8th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
thetanman:
Yes.
The problem for the politicians is to do that in such a way that it’s not too obvious.
Meanwhile, the malpractice lawyers are getting rich.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
BinT – thanks for that. I don’t have a firm opinion on health care reform right now. I know it’s a very complicated issue so I’m trying to get as many viewpoints as I can to try to make sense of it. I appreciate your taking the time! Now you can go back to bashing CA
July 8th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Bruce – California AND smokers – I see how it is, I get no lovin’ from you man, none at all
July 8th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Look I just finished seeing a fellow who cut the tip of his finger off…offered him an Atasoy flap (best option)…explained the pros and cons…and he and his wife refused because of no insurance. Offered a payment plan of a little each month (most physicians do the same to the poor with no insurance)…yet with all this, he and his wife refused any treatment other than they want to just change the dressings at home…
Of course this is not right, but they are concerned about debt, as they should be. I have one patient who pays me 16 dollars/ month for years for rebuilding his crushed face. He will never pay it off, but he feels good and he got a terrific result with lots of cranial bone grafting…yet if all my patients paid in that fashion, I’d have to do something else…I would never be able to afford overhead, salaries, malpractice insurance, supplies, rent, you know…
We can socialize medicine…just don’t expect the level of care that you get now. And in some ways, that could help…it has been shown that the better your insurance the more procedures you are likely to have and other potentially unsavory things like that. But the other hand shows that in some countries if you smoke you don’t get a CABG or if you break your hip you may have to wait until the next fiscal year if funding for this year has been spent….it isn’t an easy question, the expense of healthcare thingy…
July 8th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Bruce – Why do you think we couldn’t have a dual system here? I was just talking to the English lady who sits behind me and she said that they’ve had a working dual system in Britain for decades. Private insurance is expensive there, but it is an option along with national health. . . .
July 8th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Obviously, this is one of my 72-point type, boldface, blinking text attribute hot button subjects. I’ll toss out a few links, hopefully minimizing my editorializing, and then shut up.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j13RSaG1dJ-sOfnNG9cpjnbwu_DAD999IVO03
if this really is true, that only 1.5% of medical facilities have digital health records, then something is amiss, because surely something approaching 99% of them have digital financial bookkeeping systems. Personally, I doubt the truth of that statistic, because every facility/provider I am aware of has isolated digital medical records systems. It is a non-trivial task to standardize them and get them to regularly synchronize with each other.
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22852/
My take is not quite as cynical as Andy Kessler’s, but it’s pretty darn close.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/
An EXCELLENT comparative review of various national health care systems in a handful of countries, pointing out what the flaws and strengths of each are. Before one goes to defend our current “system” as the best of all possible worlds, it behooves oneself to become aware of the alternatives.
However, I believe (as stated by a French physician in the Frontline piece) that it is too late for America to change. There are too many vested interests in keeping the status quo, and no organized mass of people that will be able get things to change. I believe that our system is designed to — first and foremost — extract money from the patient or the patient’s insurer (which, as more and more corporations cut back on health insurance, is rapidly becoming the patient), passing it mostly to the health insurer, then to the hospitals, and finally to the hierarchy of specialists who daisy-chain their services from the payer’s wallet. The delivery of quality health care is ahead only of preventative health care in the ranking of importance.
The key question that T. R. Reid asks about every country he examines, is how many of your citizens are bankrupted by your health care system? Every time that a patient is financially ruined by the health care facility, it has failed in its hippocratic oath.
Damn. And I told myself I wouldn’t rant about this. Sorry. As you can see, I am not capable of a calm rational discussion about this topic. But it is not about people, any more than the likelihood of the financial system system being populated only with thieves and cutthroats. This is about the design of a system that is seriously warped, and doing substantial amounts of harm every day, in the name of good.
Shutting up now. Sorry for the rant.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Re Healthcare and banking. We have monetized too many things. We have evolved too many parasitic elements that contribute to increasing costs and drain assets away from providing patient care. Insurance, taxes, accounting rules, compliance obligations, Medicare and Medicaid overhead. I had one doctor explain Medicare owed him $2M in back payments, and he had to gross $1M a month just to meet office expenses.
The overhead of running a medical office has become oppressive.
If you look at the chain of profits, it too drains assets away from patient care. The worst thing we ever did was make health care/hospitals “for profit” under the guise it would make them more efficient and improve service. Bah Humbug.
If government could afford it and improve the efficiency it would make sense. But it can’t it simply adds more parasitic layers and bureaucracy. It will never remove profit draining layers from the current system. Politically unacceptable to the lobbyists.
If you want to see government healthcare in action check out a VA clinic or hospital. It’s as if their metrics are patient contacts, not patient cures. Frequently this leads to doing more harm than good. It takes 30 seconds to zip another prescription out. Of course the same thing can be said for Medicare patients. Doctors have a firm grasp of how many minutes they can spend with one before it becomes unprofitable.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
In keeping with HC topic I thought I would provide this link for those who care to read it:
http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/1187-Health-Reform-Who-Are-They-Trying-To-Fool.html
In that post Dennninger makes his case for reform from an interesting POV- price discovery. Any opinions?
I would add that the HC complex suffers from the same misallocation of resources malady which plagues virtually all the major economic circuits in the US. It’s about who gets what. Maybe some of the players need to get dealt out.
What about how the Cleveland Clinic pays their people? Is that a reasonable system which could be replicated in other places?
July 8th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Allow me to try and steer this back to the regulatory & compensation theme of this thread. If one were to chart the compensation of health insurers and hospital senior management across the years, I’ll bet a dollar that it would look very similar to that of the financial industry, at least from the 1980s forward.
I don’t know whether this is spillover from the financial industry, or if it is true for ALL corporate management, but health care has become a big-bucks business (not so much for the docs, but then one doesn’t often hear of a doctor going broke, either) with big-bucks motivations. Money may not be the Root of All Evil, but it’s sure the fertilizer, when it’s concentrated in a few pockets. That said, I’d like for evil to flourish a bit more within my own life.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Thor:
I have observed that on economic / investing blogs (like this one), the discussion of issues seems to be dominated by Republicans and Libertarians (same thing on economically-related issues). So let me give you the other side of the argument. Medical debt is still the main cause of bankruptcy. Even with all of the bankruptcies triggered by overpriced houses being defaulted on in California, Florida, Arizona, Nevada and elsewhere, medical debt is still what is driving most bankruptcies.
Sure, I guess for a while we could live in a feudal society where we have two classes of people: super-rich and everyone else. But, really, is that what all of you want? Really?
Bruce n Tn said:
If we forsake private plans because of the expense and accept what Uncle will give us, then you will see rationing and delays.
You would have rationing and delays because all of a sudden 1/6 of the population would be seeking medical care when they couldn’t before unless it was a life-threatening injury or illness. Because of this, we wouldn’t have the medical staff to deal with 50 million Americans accessing the medical care system who didn’t access it before.
Furthermore, I can’t believe that you, Bruce, didn’t know that we ration care now. It’s called rationing based on ability to pay. If your insurance company denies payment, then it becomes your responsibility (even if it bankrupts you, even if the insurance company was wrong to do it).
Here is a typical American health care story for someone with a serious illness.
And, again, in response to Bruce, here is my idea of how to deal with Social Security.
I have long advocated a single-payer, single risk-pool based system. And, unlike Bruce, I do think that you should be guaranteed healthcare as a right of American citizenship. I don’t buy this argument that we cannot “afford it.’ We are still the wealthiest country in the world. The GDP of the next largest country (in terms of economic power) is China, and their GDP is half of ours and has 4 times the population.
By the way, even if we had a single-payer and single risk-pool, that could not preclude insurance for extra services not covered by the basic plan or for additional coverage beyond the policy limits for a basic plan.
By the way, Bruce, with a national healthcare system, malpractice premiums could go down because you no longer have to factor in future medical costs like you do now. You limit damages to pain and suffering and perhaps loss of income. Limiting punitive damages (which is what insurance companies really mean when they argue for “tort reform”) is a canard because those are damages for intentionally hurting someone or something close to it.
I don’t really mean to sound, well, mean. But I think too many lives are being destroyed (along with productivity) for the benefit of certain individuals profits.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
@ Bruce 3:38 pm
“what is it you want your government to provide for you?”
I only want it to impose regulations to force the health care industry to treat people equably, with incentives to provide the greatest good for the greatest numbers (something along the lines implied by the Hippocratic oath, I believe), for insurers to spread the risk and the cost across a larger population instead of cherry-picking and cranking up rates to exclude any with any risk at all, and for health care facilities (primarily hospitals) to balance diagnostic expense and practice against reasonable standards of cost and care. If a person wants the hyper-expensive kitchen sink suite of diagnostics, then they should be expected to pay for it, but that should not be the only option available. Presently, there is no responsible application of judgement when a person walks into a hospital or treatment facility, no expense is spared, regardless of the incremental efficacy it, or lack thereof.
I don’t believe that the government should be required to intervene to accomplish those things, but as I look around, I see no other body willing to do so. Certainly not the health care or health insurance industries. And I fully expect the government to screw things up — they always do. At least then the health care industry will be experiencing a small portion of the pain and anguish that their customers do. Misery loves company.
I could go on, providing chapter and verse to my own personal experience, but allow me to summarize thusly: My wife and I are currently being bankrupted by our COBRA insurance, I have been pronounced “uninsurable” by all private insurers, so we are stuck with the COBRA coverage, which exceeds both our pensions combined on a monthly basis. Our health is in the best shape it has been in in our lives, with weight down (if not yet at the optimal BMI), my blood chemistry perfect in terms of a1c, cholesterol, tryglycerides, and my blood pressure runs about 115/70 morning and evening. No family history of cancer or alzheimers, both sets of parents are in their 80s and 90s.
Being stuck with paying for health care insurance is a lot like having an option ARM on a house that is under water. The only option is to walk away.
Back at the start of the year, I had a curious pain in my chest (59) that persisted and was enough to prevent me from sleeping. Finally, worried that it might be the onset of a heart attack (every aunt/uncle on my mother’s side has had a bypass before age 60). I am 58, and have never had any test or indication of heart trouble, and have rigorously maintained good cholesterol numbers since they first began to rise back in my early 30s, along with my blood pressure, which has also been perfectly chemically regulated since that time. But I (foolishly) went into our local hospital and asked to be checked to see if I was having a heart attack. 6 hours of testing later, the results were inconclusive, except to say for sure that I was not having a heart attack, possibly acid reflux. The determination of no heart attack was made within a minute or two of arrival. I should have got up and walked out at that point and not incurred the over $7K of worthless diagnostic tests. The symptoms had never before occurred and have never occurred since.
Meanwhile, while the insurance paid for the tests, and I paid my tiny portion of it, I have been repeatedly billed for the same work (and the same amount) from different facets of the same institution, threatened with debt collection agencies when I tried to point out that I had already paid (it was eventually resolved only because my wife had been a nurse in their IT operation for 35 years and knew who to talk to in their billing operations get their error fixed), and most recently we have received a partial refund — clearly their billing operation is outa control.
The streets in these parts are lined with 4-6 story medical facilities, going on for mile after mile after mile. Specialist clinics for everything imaginable. Hard to believe that all of it is essential, and we should be able to treat all the patients in several states with the amount of facilities within about 20 square miles of me. It certainly smacks of an industry out of control, a metastasizing of a cancerous monetary obsession within the health care industry. And that’s what I want cured. Self-regulation would be optimal, but as we have seen in the financial realm, that just doesn’t seem to work when large amounts of money are in play.
This need not and should not seriously impact the way physicians conduct their practice. Yes, it probably will, because government is a blunt instrument, not a scalpel or other precision instrument.
In a perfect world, we would see some sort of joint committee from the various industries and practices meet and agree on a list of things to be improved, survey the way things work in other places to get an idea of what is possible, and implement gradual changes here to improve our own system. Alas, it is far from “a perfect world”.
Meanwhile, the cancer in your industry grows.
July 8th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Now how did this discussion get started on healthcare, anyway?
July 8th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Hey Bruce — I’m sure that from your vantage point, it must seem like w are all lobbing hand grenades at you and/or your profession. Nothing could be further from the truth. No health care persons were harmed in the making of my rants, nor were they intended to be (well, maybe a few …).
July 8th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Memo to Ritholtz:
NEVER post a health care related item in The Big Picture.
Not that this was, or at least until it got derailed.
July 8th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
B in T-
dude- just making you aware that government employees have a TSP account (Thrift Savings Plan) that is almost identical to a 401K. The old civil service retirment system (CSRS) was grandfathered to those that were originally in the plan but has not been available since 1987. Federal employees pay into the TSP and make selections from a menu of available investment funds- similar to a 401K- there is no longer a pension system.
July 8th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Okie – Great post! A couple of things that you mentioned made me think – rationing for one, we do indeed ration health care in this country. A right to health care is also something I agree with you about. I believe that as citizens we should be guaranteed health care.
A mention of cost should also be included. As I’ve mentioned my partner is a pharmacist in a hospital. One of the major pricing issues he sees with drugs is that there is no set cost on what the hospital charges for any one drug. Medicare gets billed at one rate, different health insurances at another. The highest rate is given to those who do not have insurance. I just checked in with him and the highest price they charge a patient in his hospital for TWO Tylenol’s is TEN dollars.
July 8th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
constant – sorry, forgot to thank you as well, your post was great.
July 8th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Thor — regarding pricing of drugs, one of the astonishing discoveries I was awakened to — BTW, this should be treated as an urban legend, as I have no first-hand knowledge of the ultimate truth of what I was told — a long time ago, when my wife’s employer-owned insurer was feuding with the drug companies over drug pricing contracts, and had all the doctors working for/with the hospital revise their prescriptions of a few selected drugs (in my case it was a generic statin) to much larger dosages, and sent pill-cutters (razor blades in a plastic holder) to all the patients getting that drug.
I was aghast, and was concerned that I would be getting an imprecise dosage, and didn’t understand how this altered ANYTHING in the overall cost of the drug, until my local pharmacist told me that ALL dosages of many(/most/all?) medications cost EXACTLY THE SAME on a per-pill basis regardless of the dosage, and that by cutting larger dosages manually, the cost to the insurer was halved.
The cost of the active ingredient in the pill was a small portion of the overall cost of manufacturing the pill, and the profit margins were HUGE on the drugs that were sold, with immense development expenses bringing the profitability back down to earth from the drug company’s perspective.
There is an analogous situation in the pricing of military hardware, and this is where those tales of the $30,000 hammers come in. There will be some critical components that will be grossly under-priced in order to secure the bid, as nobody could compete with the unit price so long as the (let’s say “turbine blades”) are priced at only a dollar apiece. But in order for the vendor to make money on the deal, they throw in assorted items of “support equipment” (hammers, toilet seats) that are hugely overpriced to allow themselves to make a profit on the deal (this is an overly simplified picture of what goes on, but not terribly far off the mark).
In the case of drugs, there is a huge investment in R&D, with a lot of blind alleys that are expensive and have to be paid for some way. That way is via an unjustifiable pricing model that bears no relation to the cost of developing and manufacturing that particular drug, and more toward the overall needs of the business. Hence drug prices vary all over the map, getting whatever the market will bear, with each customer being treated as a separate market. The widespread use of patent protection to build walls of profitability around individual products only contributes to the disconnect between demand and price, by removing competition as a price-regulating mechanism.
The problem in both instances is a badly-designed system of allocating costs from an extensive and expensive R&D system into the few results from that system, with competition being rendered ineffective as a means of capping prices by the firewalls of patent protection and proprietary designs.
I have no solutions to this, certainly wiser and brighter folk than I have grappled with this and failed, and the messy ad-hoc pricing system we have in the pharmaceutical world is the result of this. However, that does not mean that experiments in better accounting methodologies and opening up of the markets to competition should not be pursued.
July 8th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
Thats it, I’m outa this thread, and I’m not coming back.
July 8th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
constant – I forwarded your story to my partner and he said that he didn’t think it sounded like an urban legend as it is something he has seen happen in his career.
As for recouping the cost of research and testing, that’s a hard one. On the one hand, it seems fair that the drug companies should be making enough profit to cover the development cost of new drugs. On the other hand, the American people are the one’s paying for the research and development of drugs for the entire world as every other country strictly limits the price of drugs. Then there’s the whole idea of advertising, how much money is being spent to advertise Abien CR versus the cost it took to reformulate the original version so that they could side-step the patent expiring? Abien is just one example of the dozens of drugs the pharmaceutical companies do this for . . .
July 8th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
Constant – Not sure if you’re still reading this thread but here’s a more detailed answer for the first part of your earlier post. Straight from the horses mouth
We have often procured one drug strength at a better contract rate, then 1/2 tab it if needed, since many are flat priced for all the strengths (i.e. his statin..Zocor 10, 20, 40, and 80mg all the same $$).
so 1/2 a 40mg tab for a 20mg dose, saves 50% drug cost and gives you the same therapy…
July 8th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
Okie:
Someone will pay for medical care. If you think the care under a governmental system will be anywhere close to private care that you now enjoy, you are more than wrong. Some have said that the main reason we haven’t had socialized medicine up to now is that until recently people realized they’d have to take a step-down in care, at least those who could afford it, if medicine were socialized. They are right.
Please don’t couch the discussion in terms of uninsured. I understand that. I am just saying, expect less in the future. Then you won’t be disappointed. If you think you’ll have anything like what you have now, rethink it.
July 8th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
I am just saying, expect less in the future.
————–
I bet that even private 90% of the population can expect less in the future.
July 8th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
danm-
good point- probably true
July 9th, 2009 at 12:42 am
Here’s the WSJ link:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124224500014216399.html
July 9th, 2009 at 8:18 am
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