SUMMARY: An editorial by Margarida Jorge, the campaign director of the Lower Drug Prices Now coalition and Frank Clemente is the executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness piles on big pharma but they are doing their readers a disservice by focusing strictly on pharma drug prices.
Cost of healthcare
KEY TAKEAWAY: [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]There are 540 billionaires in the United States, with a combined net worth of $2.399 trillion, according to our 2016 list of the world’s richest people.[/inlinetweet] That’s more billionaires and more combined net worth than any other nation in the world. What if half of them decided to donate $10 million to a program to bring free healthcare to those who can’t afford it in the US?
KEY TAKEAWAY: Accoring to the Economist, “EVERY year America spends about $5,000 more per person on health care than other rich countries do. With healthcare firms making excess profits of $65bn a year. Surprisingly, the worst offenders are not pharmaceutical firms, but an army of corporate healthcare middlemen”. However, the patient, stick in the middle of this debate, doesn’t care.