Obamacare is not an on/off switch that corporate interests lobbied for or against. Obamacare = thousands of pages of a 'reform' in which every member of the health care cartel spent billions in helping to create. (They say total lobby costs amount to = 1.2 billion but this is only the amount that can be reported. The real amount is probably well above 10 times this figure.)
If you Google "Pharmaceuticals - Lobby - Obamacare", I think you will see more than enough evidence to show that the pharmaceutical industry not only lobbied for what we know as "Obamacare" today but probably wrote some of it themselves. When it comes to big government + lobbies + corporations, I am just as skeptical as you. I have been involved in work that required lobbies. (although not medical) I can tell you often times, plenty of lobbying dollars are spent on PR, just to impress the public. So unless we are directly involved in the lobby efforts of pharmaceuticals for Obamacare, neither of us will know which aspects of the reform they lobbied for or against. But with some history on our side, we will ALWAYS know who lobbied for what. . . as nobody lobbies for policies that will hurt their profitability.
Your argument is that pharmaceuticals stand to lose per unit margin due to a $750 per person cap and standardized pricing for prescriptions. My argument is that pharmaceuticals do not pay billions of dollars directly into the bank accounts of politicians in order to lose profitability. They will achieve higher overall profit due to higher rate of turn over of patients for which any pharmaceutical sales rep will tell you equals higher prescription volume.
The state I live in, Massachusetts, is the charter test market for Obamacare. If you ride any of the inner-city buses, you will see ads and signs (obviously directed at undereducated and underprivileged) to seek FREE health care for everything from mammograms to STD's to cardiovascular health. For some, there are hardly any out of pocket expenses but somebody pays. . . who? Tax payers pay. Why or how do you think they came up with that 750 dollar cap? Pull out of the sky? No. . . it's the bean counters at the pharmaceuticals who calculate (based on charter programs) the optimum level of margin that helps them form an optimum level of patient volume that will maximize their profits. Do you know how they gauge the efficacy of Obamacare? The metrics have nothing to do with actual improvement in health and everything to do with ROI, how many prescriptions written, how many mammograms administered, how many vaccines, administered, etc . . (This information was given to me directly by a physician who practices poverty health care in Massachusetts and I have seen the documents and form letters)
Obamacare is a high volume business, not a high margin business.
And yes, I was surprised at how many healthy-looking people aren't healthy at all. Based on the questions I asked the physicians in the Korean Health Screening Center, including the CHIEF of the operation himself (By the way, coming to a town near you soon) nearly everybody (who comes for annual "required" screening and not due to personal reasons) goes home with a bill to submit to their insurance and that's it. Those who do get filtered through the flowchart are people with high blood pressure. (Pharma lobbied to lower what is considered high blood pressure to peddle more meds back in the 90's) And those with cysts and growths. (This is another industry in its own right and probably deserves thread of its own. It's a great money maker. . .)
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