The Case for Pharmacare. It's Better and It's a Big Money Saver.

Canada is the only developed country that provides universal health care that doesn't also have universal pharmacare coverage.

A new report claims that not only can Canada implement such a system, it could save Canadians billions.

In Monday’s issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, researchers say the extra total cost to government of providing universal pharmacare could range as high as $5.4 billion a year, but would likely be about $1 billion, depending on exactly how much can be saved through bulk purchases of medications and other measures.

At the same time, it would save the private sector the $8.2 billion annually it spends on prescription drugs, mainly through employee health plans.
Saving 'billions of dollars'

"When we did the analysis, we were, at first, a little bit surprised," said study author Steven Morgan, a professor of health policy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. "Wow. Canada can really save billions of dollars by covering everybody for virtually every drug? And then we started to look deeper at the math, and it made perfect sense.

"You save about 10 per cent by getting better generic prices, you save about 10 per cent [on] brand name prices and you save an additional 10 per cent by encouraging more cost-effective prescribing," Morgan said, using conservative estimates. "Mine those three things together, you save 30 per cent of a very large budget. Therefore you're saving billions of dollars."

If Canada achieved "middle of the pack" spending as in comparable countries like Switzerland, Italy and Spain, and achieved the rates of generic drug use seen in some provincial drug plans, a universal public drug plan would reduce total spending on prescription drugs in Canada by $7.3 billion per year, the study’s authors say.  

The U.S. Legacy from Iraq and Afghanistan - Only a Nuclear Attack Could be Worse

The costs and political fallout from America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are and will continue to be enormous, somewhere between 4 and 6-trillion dollars.   That could be almost as damaging to American security than if the U.S. suffered a nuclear attack.

Money, ultimately, is power. In context, it would take a nuclear strike on the United States to inflict the kind of economic damage that the wars have reaped. The only nations capable of inflicting such damage are disinclined toward doing so; and no non-state actor will plausibly obtain the capability to match such a threat. All of that damage is the result not of what bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or the insurgencies that began in their wake did to America, but because of how American strategiests chose to respond. As Radiohead once sang, you do it to yourself, and that’s why it really hurts. 

Linda J. Bilmes of the Harvard Kennedy School estimates that the wars bin Laden provoked the U.S. into launching over the past decade have cost “somewhere between $4 and $6 trillion.” She reaches that staggeringly high total by calculating not just what the U.S. spent on fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also what it will spend on veterans’ health care and benefits; equipment refurbishment; future commitments made to the Iraqi and Afghan governments the U.S. sponsors; and the repayment of the debt incurred by financing the wars through foreign borrowing. Notably, by Bilmes’ framework, the real costs of the wars will only manifest long after the troops have come home.

She’s also under-counting. The shadow wars in Yemen, Pakistan, east Africa and north-central Africa will not cost nearly as much as the Army-intensive wars of Iraq or Afghanistan. But they’ll still cost something, either through leased infrastructure to base aircraft and special-operations forces; political commitments to host governments; support to allied war efforts; and some personnel costs. All these wars have the same wellspring as Iraq and Afghanistan: U.S. overreaction to terrorism.


“One of the most significant challenges to future US national security policy will not originate from any external threat,” Bilmes writes. “Rather it is simply coping with the legacy of the conflicts we have already fought in Iraq and Afghanistan”.

In the run-up to the invasion and conquest of Iraq, Rumsfeld's minions estimated (and budgeted) for a total cost of between $60- to 95-billion.

Mama Get the Chequebook, Daddy Bought a War

What's the tab going to be for George w. Bush's eternal "War on Terror" in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, writing in The Times of London, figure it'll come to at least $3-trillion. That's three thousand billion dollars or, if you like, three thousand thousand million dollars. Figure that out at roughly $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America, $32,000 for a family of four, and it's all borrowed money so there'll be plenty to be paid in interest before that's ever squared away.

So, you're probably asking yourself, who are Joe Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes? He was chief economist at the World Bank and won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2001. She is a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

The right-wing nutjobs (like our own SHarper) constantly rave about "socialist plots to transfer wealth." Here's a transfer of wealth on a previously unimagineable scale - except its from the taxpaying working and middle classes to the already enormously wealthy, taxation exempt, investment classes, America's rentiers, the guys who own big hunks of Halliburton or Blackwater or Lockheed Martin.

Remember when Rumsfeld boasted that the Iraq war would cost the US $50-billion, $60-billion tops? Remember when Larry Lindsey, President Bush's economic adviser and head of the National Economic Council, suggested that they might reach $200 billion and got ridiculed and sacked for it?

At the moment, the operating costs for the US war in Iraq is running at $12.5-billion per month and the bill for Afghanistan is actually higher - $16-billion per month. But it still seems a long reach from $29-billion a month to $3-trillion. That, according to Stiglitz and Blimes, is in what's not included in the operating expenses.

To put this in perspective, $3-trillion is way more than the US bill for Korea or even its war in Vietnam. It's more than US costs for WWI. Only WWII, which cost a grand total of $5-trillion USD was more expensive.

"From the unhealthy brew of emergency funding, multiple sets of books, and chronic underestimates of the resources required to prosecute the war, we have attempted to identify how much we have been spending -- and how much we will, in the end, likely have to spend. The figure we arrive at is more than $3 trillion. Our calculations are based on conservative assumptions. They are conceptually simple, even if occasionally technically complicated. A $3 trillion figure for the total cost strikes us as judicious, and probably errs on the low side. Needless to say, this number represents the cost only to the United States. It does not reflect the enormous cost to the rest of the world, or to Iraq."

By the time the America people are finally asked to begin paying off this colossal debt, the profits will be long gone, fltered out to Bush's "base" in bloated dividend cheques and squirreled away in offshore tax havens.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/77663/?page=entire