We’ve mentioned this before, but we think of it so often. One of our readers reports that someone he’d been at university with in Australia, who’d ended up as a University Professor in the US, recently wrote this in an email to him – “I’m 73, and should have retired years ago, but here in the US, any nest eggs we may have built up for our retirement can be gone in a flash if we have any sort of medical problems, and so we all keep working – it’s a strange culture we live in.” So, a Univestity Professor, no less, working past his normal retirement age in fear of the possibility that he may not be able to afford proper care if he has any medical problems!
This, on top of what one of our other readers has told us, and that is that pills that can be bought in India for $5 are sold for $1,200 in the US?
So what about those who don’t have the incomes that University Professors have?
Our point, of course, is that we very much fear that, in relation to these matters, Australia is heading in the same direction.
One of our Australian readers has recently claimed that erectile disfunction tablets that he can get from India for $1 cost him $26 each if he buys them from an Australian pharmacy, (so $104 gets him 4 tablets in Australia and 104 tablets form India!!!) and anything he has to pay to get the prescription he needs to get them comes on top of this – and each prescription he gets gets him only 4 tablets, there are no repeats.
It’s claimed that Americans were spending 5% of their GDP on health care in 1965, and that this had increased to 18.5% by 2018 – you can imagine how happy these developments make the pharmaceutical companies, the private hospitals, and so on. But, oops!, their life expectancy has declined in each of the last three years!
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