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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I live in Belgium; here, it's the other way around: comparison of announced government measures or law proposals to the ones of other countries, is made extensively ("In The Netherlands, they have a system which..." / "Look what a disaster the UK Railway privatisation was, let's not do that here" / ...).

To the extent that it is mostly an excuse to hide ideological motives. For every possible change, there has to be a neighbouring country which applied just that (or further away, we recently had a fierce discussion about the "kiwi model" consisting of the New Zealand way of using government tenders for drugs). Regardless of any other circumstances which might differ and make the comparison worthless.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I've heard a lot of things that I don't know are true. If they were all true, then that may mean a lot of things.

I am going to make a list of all the things that I have heard that I don't know are true. After I do that, I'll go from there.

In the mean time, I'll stick to the one thing I know is true. There is an imaginary line over which were I to cross, I could get drugs cheaper than if I stayed on this side of that line.

The reason we can not cross that over that line, or have the 'other-side-of-the-line-people' ship the drugs to us at the lower price is that the people who have the power to make us pay more have persuaded the people who have the power to let us pay less to stop us from paying less.

In a nutshell, we are paying a sales tax to the pharmaceuticals. They are just tossing out strawmen to cover the action taken by our 'duly elected representatives in our democratic nation'.

Nothing new or rare in that for our 'duly' folk.

As for the remedy for that, that too is a prescription issue.

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