Yesterday, I was alerted to An Introduction to Health Commons by John Wilbanks

I placed a link to this on another Forum and received the following comments from individuals in Canada and the US respectively as below.

Please consider watching the presentation, reading the associated text and commenting here.

Great idea Graham but in order to succeed I think that it also requires that the drug companies themselves be under public ownership.

Modern medicine has been extraordinarily successful in only two main areas— control of infectious disease, and trauma care. Both were government-funded initiatives. Control of infectious disease was regarded as warranting government intervention because epidemics cause problems for governments. Trauma care was revolutionized during the Vietnam war because the body count was becoming a political liability for the US government. (In earlier US wars, it was crippled soldiers and not dead ones who represented the greatest political liability.)

Neurodegenerative and cardiovascular disease and cancer do not yet threaten the US government— in fact, the huge amounts of money spent on not solving those problems provides a profit stream so fat that it fuels political parties. In other words, politicians are very happy with the medical establishment just the way it is. Until something happens to make them unhappy with the way things are, to the point where they fear losing their jobs, the government will not do any major reform of the system. ……..The impending collapse of Social Security may eventually provide that fear, we’ll see. …….If public but nongovernmental healthcare reforms were to take enough money out of “the system” to where it no longer owns government through right of purchase, that eventuality would cut politicians some flexibility as well.