rds248

I didn't say they were benevolent. I said they provided a valuable product.
Managed care companies do not.

Let's put it in perspective. Go back to 1940. There are no antibiotics except sulfa, which is not very effective (Penicillin was not widely available until the 50's). There are no antihypertensive meds (FDR died of a stroke from uncontrolled hypertension), no antidepressants or antipsychotics, and few effective vaccines. There are no anti cholesterol agents, and many men drop dead in their 40's from heart attacks. A diagnosis of cancer of any kind is a death sentence, since there are no oncology drugs, and most cancers are ineffectively treated by surgery only. There is no treatment for leukemia, and patients die in a few weeks. Anesthesia for surgery is with ether, which is actually very hard to use and very dangerous, so there are many anesthesia related deaths. There is no effective medicine for peptic ulcers, and many patients need major surgery to remove the acid producing portion of their stomach to survive or prevent bleeding.

Every one of the medical conditions above is now effectively treated by a huge number of effective and safe medications which were developed and made available by the pharmaceutical industry. To fail to acknowledge that is simply ridiculous. I am not saying that everything they do is ethical or done to benefit patients, but over the last 100 years they have provided immeasurable benefit and revolutionized medical treatment.
All health Insurance companies have done is make their CEO's rich.

And don't tell me about how drug companies are hiding the fact that alternative therapies are better. People that argue that kind of thing for the most part have no understanding of how science is done, and how effective medical therapies are developed and tested. Unfortunately our society has for the most part become completely ignorant of the scientific method and how it works, so they think that if someone claims that a particular treatment helped them, that's enough. If we depended on that kind of information, we'd still be in the Middle Ages where the average person lived to be about 35.

And by the way, I don't work for the drug companies, but I am a physician.
If I had to practice with the drugs available in 1940, I would be telling most patients that there is nothing I can do to help them. Before we had all these effective treatments, most of Medicine was just diagnosis and prognosis... telling patients when they are going to die from the disease they have, and trying to make them more comfortable.