Health, Money, and Human Nature

The challenge for pharmaceutical drug peddlers: convincing the 5 billion who aren't yet hooked on pharmaceuticals that entering the pharma-drug culture is a good thing.

A lot of people are not yet on the drug bandwagon. In many nations it's simply a matter of affordability: pharma drugs are not affordable and therefore it is not rational to spend much time desiring them. In some nations, however, the population is right on the verge of contentment. When a nation achieves contentment one of the marks of its decadence is the love affair with pharmaceutical drugs. The U.S. has long achieved this plateau of civilization, and as a result it now finds itself hooked on the idea that life is worth preserving at all economic costs. This runaway, self-aggrandizing philosophy has taken over the whole of health care in the U.S. And to what end? Has the belief that life is worthy of preservation created a more satisfying contentment among the people?

On the contrary: the addiction to drug-addled life has only made the people more miserable. Like any addict, the pharma addict's life is driven by a cycle of pleasure and tension that can only be broken by giving up the assumption that life is worth living even in the face of overwhelming economic cost.

More than any other modern debate, the question of health care financing cuts to the core of the human nature discussion. To know a people today is to understand its health care financing system.