CEO’s do not invent new medications and claims that executive compensation is tied to the success of medical research is… questionable at best, if not laughable.

Pharmaceutical companies must be dealt with from both ends, both as part of comprehensive drug policy reform and as comprehensive health care reform. They are on the short list of trusts most in need of busting, like the media, the oil industry and the auto industry they have become a virtual cartel.

Of course Health Care industry also encompasses the Pharmaceutical companies who claim that if their CEO’s don’t get multi million dollar bonuses no more new drugs will ever be invented again – forever.   They don’t use those exact words, but that’s pretty much what it comes down to.

There aren’t too many pundits who acknowledge that the dreaded bureaucrats also work in Private Insurance companies.   Conservatives seem to believe that only government bureaucrats are bad, but that the adjuster at an insurance company has your best interest in mind at all times.

Why else would we have to call our insurance company for pre-authorization?   Personally, if I have to,  I’d rather call the government.  At least I can be assured that they have a reasonable payscale for their compensation.  That their compensation doesn’t go up because they were able to deny me service.   I’d also be assured that the Secretary (CEO) of that department will not be making more than the President of the United States.

Some Republicans (Mitt Romney, while governor of Massachusetts, where a similar plan passed, comes to mind) have championed an unfunded insurance mandate loosely based on the French and German systems, but without the non-profit clause or regulation of minimum standards of care. Such a mandate would not be noticeably better than our current system, because it would not remove the basic problem of American health care: the necessity to collect as much money as possible while providing as little care as possible in order to make a profit.