01-16-2017, 01:29 PM
Quote:Last week, during a panel discussion at the annual Allied Social Sciences Association (ASSA) meeting in Chicago on January 6, 2017, Nobel laureate Angus Deaton described the American healthcare system as “optimally designed for rent-seeking and very poorly designed to improve people’s health.”Purdue: Drug Company or Genocidal Maniac?
Reports Asher Schechter for Pro-Market, the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business blog: While some forms of inequality could be linked to progress and innovation, said Deaton, inequality in the U.S. does not stem from creative destruction. “A lot of the inequality in the U.S. is not like this. It comes from rent-seeking. It comes from firms and industry seeking special protection or special favors from the government,” he said.3
In his remarks, Deaton referred to a 2015 study that he and his wife, Princeton professor Anne Case, published in 2015. In the paper, Deaton and Case analyzed health and mortality records and showed a troubling rise in the death rates of middle-aged white Americans. This rise in mortality was unique to white non-Hispanic Americans, they concluded, and was driven primarily by an epidemic of suicides and diseases related to substance abuse among poorly educated whites, particularly heroin and prescription opioids such as oxycodone.
“There are around 200,000 people who have died from the opioid epidemic, were victims of iatrogenic medicine and disease caused by the medical profession, or from drugs that should not have been prescribed for chronic pain but were pushed by pharmaceutical companies, whose owners have become enormously rich from these opioids,” said Deaton, who later advocated for a single-payer healthcare system in the U.S., saying: “I am a great believer in the market, but I think we need a single-payer healthcare system. I just don’t see any other sensible way to address it in this country.”