The problem with applying unfettered capitalism to the health system is that it takes the purpose of health care away from curing disease and keeping people healthy and makes it selling them health care products and services.  Suppose a new superbug suddenly appeared in hospitals all over the world.  Suppose it was killing people and there didn’t seem to be any way of stopping it from spreading from the hospitals to the general public.  But suppose that all along there were older, generic drugs that could kill this new superbug and could have prevented the deaths of those who had died, but the drug companies weren’t interested in them there was no profit to be had in selling people the old drugs…

It’s not fiction…it’s happening right now.  You’ve heard about that new super staph bacteria…right…?

Deadly Staph Germs May Be Cured by Old, $1-a-Day Antibiotics

Nov. 7 (Bloomberg) — Generic, World War II-era antibiotics may become the newest weapon of choice in the fight against deadly, drug-resistant staph germs.

Physicians funded by the U.S. government are mounting two studies of drugs costing less than $1 a day to treat methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA. The bacteria, once found only in hospitals and nursing homes, are spreading to communal settings such as schools and gyms. Last month, MRSA was linked to the deaths of a student in New York and one in Virginia.

The generic antibiotics are used to treat infections before they require surgery. Drugmakers, meanwhile, are spending hundreds of millions developing medicines that cost more than $100 a day to treat advanced cases. More than 18,000 Americans annually are killed by MRSA, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

…

The grants represent a realization by the NIH that there is a “gap in the current knowledge” about the older drugs and that government needs to step in when market conditions may discourage drug companies from filling it, Moran says.

“We know these drugs work,” he says. “They are already in wide use. But we want to confirm what doctors are doing, and the trials may change behavior somewhat.”

…

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of the NIH, says the grants were intended to fill a vacuum left by pharmaceutical companies. Drugmakers, he says, don’t have an economic incentive to study drugs with expired patents or to develop antibiotics that have limited market potential.

(Emphasis mine)  The article goes on to state that the use of the older drugs is only a stopgap measure until newer (hideously expensive) drugs can be developed.  But of course, those newer drugs will also only be stopgap measures too, as the germs evolve and develop resistance.  But look at this confession here, that the profit motive doesn’t work in health care, and so the government has to step in and do these tests.  Drugs may already exist that kill this new superbug, but we don’t know that, because the drug companies aren’t interested in selling them because they can’t make enough profit on them.

And the bottom line there is, people are dying for the sake of drug company profits.  Welcome to the best health care system in the world, according to the republicans.  And obviously what’s so good about our health care system is how much money it makes for the drug companies.  That’s the purpose of health care in George Bush’s America.  Not to cure sick people.  Not to keep healthy people healthy.  The purpose of health care in America is to make drug company executives rich.