These stories are becoming more and more frequent:
As their minivan rolled north, they felt their nerves kick in — but they kept on driving.
At the wheel: Lija Greenseid, a rule-abiding Minnesota mom steering her Mazda5 on a cross-border drug run.
Her daughter, who is 13, has Type 1 diabetes and needs insulin. In the United States, it can cost hundreds of dollars per vial. In Canada, you can buy it without a prescription for a tenth of that price.
So, Greenseid led a small caravan last month to the town of Fort Frances, Ontario, where she and five other Americans paid about $1,200 for drugs that would have cost them $12,000 in the United States.
For profit medicine is a fucking disaster. The “profit” of a good medical system is a healthy and productive populace, a society where people can allocate their resources to productive things rather than being gouged for medicine and medical procedures, and where people are not miserable and stressed out about medical bills.
I am not god emperor, but if I were, the very first fucking thing I would do is mandate single payer, nationalize the production of critical drugs in which there is no research and development being done to improve the drugs but just straight up price gouging, and ban health insurance for anything but elective procedures. Because it’s been my experience that a large and vocal portion of the medical community are entitled whiny ass titty babies who think they deserve millions of dollars per year and will do anything to preserve their wealth and status, a belief in part created by the ridiculous costs of medical school and the absolutely insane practice of grueling residencies, I would nationalize medical school, too, and then cap salaries. I’d also expand the number of nurses and technicians who do the actual bulk of the work in the medical industry.
This will displace a bunch of people in the insurance industry and medical admistration and elsewhere, and that’s just fucking fine- we will need a robust regulatory community to keep an eye out for fraud and abuse. That should create a few jobs. And the flunky pretty boy douchebags and their cheerleader counterparts who flocked to pharmaceutical sales will just have to find honest work somewhere.
And don’t come at me bashing the VA saying this would be no better- veterans love the VA. A few fucking loudmouths don’t.
The end. There’s your fucking marching orders. Make it happen.