Why cure something that a drug company can just keep you coming back for more medication to control whatever? Control equals profits, cures equal a profit margin that will disappear.
It's not QUITE as bad up in Canada but in general the Western approach to medicine, at the commercial level, is very much focused on generating continuous revenue streams rather than a possible solution.
What I mean is, we used to say
"We must eradicate tuberculosis, we must eradicate polio, we must eradicate smallpox, we must eradicate HIV".
I haven't heard anything about eradicating diabetes, heart disease, multiple sclerosis or Alzheimers disease. I'm hearing about controlling symptoms and managing the illness.
And when it comes to HIV, indeed...we've now turned a corner.
Gilead Pharmaceutical is trying to claim that the U.S. Government patent on Truvada, a drug that was 100 percent created at taxpayer expense, is INVALID, and it has the right to charge $2000 a month for it in the USA versus EIGHT dollars in Australia.
So much for eradicating or preventing AIDS. If you're wealthy you can join in the eradication and prevention fight against this global killer.
Don't have 300 bucks? Sorry, no Humalog insulin for you then.
A Pharmacy Benefit Management middleman cartel is now in control of pricing, and they've double or even tripled the US price of insulin in the last four years.
The original patent on Insulin sold for THREE dollars, one dollar each for the three scientists who invented it.
They agreed that this was the best way to
ensure that affordable treatment would be available to everyone who needed it.
By the way, for the last sixty years, we've used the same approach to fighting WARS. We no longer officially declare a "state of war" through Congress and that means we don't have to formulate a hard objective or an end game or plan for the aftermath, not if we can continue "managing the conflict".
(translation: maintain the revenue stream)
It doesn't even matter if we lose. As long as the conflict continues to be managed, the war profiteers WIN.
And that's because the moment an enemy surrenders, the war is over and so is the gravy train, and then begins the expensive proposition of helping the target country's society to return to some semblance of normalcy, and that sort of thing requires altruism, which is perhaps the most profit-draining idea in the universe.
I am not against profit.
There are millions of ways to make obscene amounts of money in this world but when it comes to things which determine absolute life or death for millions of people, it is hard for me to cheer for profit.