Quote Originally Posted by GGT View Post
wiggin, as an academic working in the medical science field, you surely know about budget constraints. Your education, and your job, are heavily linked to public investments (ie policy and consequent taxes). While I think it's great that we're living in the greatest era ever....that doesn't preclude me from criticizing our faults and flaws.

I don't mind paying your salary, if I can benefit from your work. What I don't like is paying your salary, plus your golden parachute retirement plan, for things I can't afford to buy outright or don't have a defined benefit plan, and don't qualify for subsidy relief. In other words, what might be your bread-and-butter, studying things like genetic related renal failure (for example), might mean my demise. If I can't afford your "services" but I've paid taxes for decades that helped you get your skills, what's up with that disparity?

Getting older happens fast. Every year now seems like 5 or 10 when I was younger. I don't mind dying....but I DO mind if it's because of income disparities. See rural hospital funding.
GGT, let's see how many things are wrong in this post:

1. I'm not in academics.
2. You don't pay my salary; for a few years in grad school my $26k/year stipend was covered by a competitive government grant, but that was a long time ago and hardly qualified as a 'salary'.
3. I don't have a golden parachute retirement plan. Where the hell did you get that idea? I save for my retirement like any other joe schmoe, and it ain't funded by the government. If you mean the piddling defined benefit plan I qualified for, it's a drop in the bucket and was funded by a private source.

Do you know who does pay for my salary, and my research? Corporations, funded either by the stock market or venture capital firms. And they actually need to make money to, you know, make more awesome stuff.

There are very valid critiques of the way our healthcare system works - and indeed firms that develop medical technologies should not be exempted from such criticism. But it's important to note that there are no free lunches. It's hard, and complicated, and expensive to make people better - everything from the initial technology development to the diagnosis to the treatment and later management. We could do a whole hell of a lot better, but at some point we're going to have to ration things. All of these debates come down to how it's best to structure the system and ration in the most fair manner.

None of this, however, detracts from the fact that despite all of these problems things have gotten much better for the vast majority of people. Even the poorest people in the world now have access to care and technologies that were unheard of just a few decades ago. We've still got a ridiculously large amount to do to make things even better, but let's have some perspective here. Things are, in general, getting better.