I wonder how well Tucker rolls joints?

He's lucky he hasn't gotten a visit from Mika's Dad in the middle of the night.

makes you sick to watch these 2 A$$ H***

gave Obama so much $$$, same as they gave Hillary.

are doing so much for us now!
Onwards!/snark.

Progressive, yes; populist, no.

NONE of the other have advocated not-for-profit health care or EVEN a single-payer system.

research is done in the universities. Actual research costs to pharma companies is less than 1%

where private companies stop using research done by the government and universities which we all pay for and then get the patents for themselves and make billions.

Their excuses about expensive R&D are complete BS.

you're saying that Pharma comapnies

devote your lives and all your money (which wouldn't be enough) to developing new drugs?

Why are you asking us to do more than they do?

It's good enough for you if they do it to make enormous profits, but if we want to complain about enormous profittaking with people's lives and health at stake, we have to be willing to go to the other extreme and spend our lives and all our money?

what perfect world is that will give us the miraculous advances in medicine we've seen in the last fifty years and make it cheap?

Well, actually, advances in computer modeling and biochemical research done by universites to understand biological system behaviours will give us this.  If we poured the same money into public university departments doing these studies rather than stockholder run for-profit companies, we'd have the best science labs in the world, and be churning out tons of highly educated scientists to boot.

where an entire infrastructure of superhighways spanning tens of thousands of miles and requiring constant maintenance and upkeep can be driven on for only nominal fees?

Surely, that's impossible.

What a perfect world where each city or county has it's own security and fire fighting force that will come to your house if you report a crime or fire, and not charge you a thing.

Surely, that's impossible.

Those miraculous advances in medicine have come through R&D done at Universities and through government funding.  The pharmaceutical companies do some research in terms of funding clinical trials but they also spend a hell of a lot of money on marketing which increases costs for us but do nothing to improve the drugs we receive (and arguably increase the risk of us getting less effective drugs).  

Ultimately all of this does cost money, no doubt, but the problem is that because of the way the system works right now, the US pays a disproportionate cost for the medical advances of the world.  I don't expect that we're going to suddenly get miraculously cheap drugs through judicious use of fairy dust, but we can definitely rebalance the equation so that we aren't subsidizing everybody else.

As for the litigation, if a pharmaceutical company hides evidence of failures in their clinical trials, they deserve what they get.  If a company puts a good faith effort into insuring the safety and effectiveness of their product, they expose themselves to less liability.  Sure there are some frivolous lawsuits, but by and large the big damages only happen when a company tries to pull a fast one.

There is no perfect world and even with some form of universal coverage and drug price negotiation we will have to balance the costs of new therapies against their results.  But we can absolutely do better than we are today as there are countless examples of countries doing just that.  

It is going for advertising.  All the TV spots and glossy magazine ads aren't cheap.  Ever noticed how much of both kinds there are?

The type of research a pharmaceutical company pays for is typically how to make a certain drug more efficiently. Mixing faster, catalyzing with something less expensive, that sort of thing. Stuff that has no effect on the health of the consumer.

Pure research into new medications is often done by people in universities. They occasionally get relatively small grants from corporations, but it often just comes from the NSF.

Universities nowadays pride themselves on "technology transfer": giving away results of pure research to companies who will then make a profit on them.