- The Guardian
- Issue #2179
How’s your health? People like to say you can’t take your health for granted. One thing we do take for granted in Australia – most of us – is medicine. If you’re sick, you can see a doctor, and if you need medicine you go to the chemists and get some.
That’s most of us. Healthcare is very stretched in this country, especially in country areas. Most people though, if they need medicine, can go get some.
We shouldn’t take these things for granted because we didn’t always have them and there’s no reason to think we’ll always have them. In fact, there are very good reasons to think that the affordable medicine we have in this country won’t last forever.
Still, at least we’re not the US. Almost all Australians, no matter how they feel about the USA, know that the health system there is a hot mess. Health insurance companies come between people and medical services and charge a fortune. It’s not unknown for people in the US to stay in jobs they don’t like for the health insurance. Some stay in marriages they don’t like for the same reason – the spouse they can’t stand has good health insurance that covers them too.
It’s crazy! Likewise with medicines. As business reporter Ian Verrender says, for a nation at the forefront of medical innovation and drug manufacture, vast numbers of US citizens “simply can’t afford to access to vital medicines.”
Australians are much better off because we have Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, the PBS. The PBS means that instead of pharma companies ripping us off one by one, they have to deal with the Australian government, one big buyer, first. The result is that, mostly, we can afford the medicine we need (see Guardian #2139 ‘PBS: Need not greed’ for details)
Big pharmaceutical companies hate this – a market of some 26 million people not paying the absolute maximum. Pharma lobbyists, complaining to the US government called the PBS “egregious and discriminatory.” They also claimed that the less-than-obscene profits they extract from sick Australians stifle innovation and competitiveness.
There is huge pressure from the big pharma companies to change this situation. They’ve been working on it for decades and they have very deep pockets. Good news for now is that Prime Minister Albanese has said that the PBS is not up for negotiation, when it was first threatened by the Trump administration.
That’s good … as far as it goes, but Albo has been known to back down before. The PBS covers a gigantic number of drugs. Every other month medications are added and deleted. Someone we know saw the cost of two vital medications go from $7 to $40 overnight! So in the face of especially hard lobbying, or to give Donald Trump the impression he’s had a win, it wouldn’t be impossible for the government to tweak the PBS to give big Pharma a bit of what it wants.
Big capital never stops working for higher returns, that’s the nature of the beast. This means that as long as there are huge profits at stake, they’ll keep working on it and we can’t take our wealth for granted. The government would like us to think they’ve got this sorted, but really all they’ve done is put up chicken wire to keep a very patient and powerful fox at bay.
The real solution for long term security about our health is for the people to own and run the medicine business for public benefit, not for profit. That might sound utopian and impossible, but that’s how the US feels about the PBS. We know it’s possible because we’ve got it. Public ownership of the medicine-making business is possible. That’s what the Communist Party of Australia is working for.
