Just how big is big? Pharma and the "health care" industries

Dr. David Eifrig writes an investment newsletter. Having graduated from a prestigious MBA program his first job was on a trading desk at Goldman Sachs, one of the most plum wall street jobs an MFA grad can land.  He left Wall Street however, because, in his words, he was disgusted with the corruption there.

His father and uncle were MDs, so then he then decided to become a doctor and enrolled in medical school, again at a prestigious university known for it's medical school. Then as a doc in practice he again found a level of corruption in medicine distasteful (how many meds are average senior citizens obliged to consume?), and at that point retired completely to writing an investing letter, which he's now done for about two decades.

Dr. Eifrig made these points in a recent letter:

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- Health care makes up nearly 20% of the U.S. economy.

- It employs over 20 million people.

- At $4.1 trillion, it’s not just bigger than every penny spent nationwide on food, cars, or energy, it’s bigger than all three put together.

- Ask any American which federal department gets the most funding and almost everyone will say defense.

- The DoD is certainly huge, with a nearly $800 billion budget this year.

- But the “winner” is the Department of Health and Human Services. It’s twice as big at $1.6 trillion. Nothing else comes close.

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All things considered it appears obvious from multiple perspectives that health care is the most corrupt industry in modern history. Of all these perspectives the most obvious is the fact pharmacology is a failure, we spend massively more on legal drugs than any other country in the world, and have the worst health to show for it.

In a fair fight between pharma drugs and a truly nutritious diet, pharma gets absolutely clobbered in the reversal of the chronic diseases so common these days.

And then there's the cost of expensive (patented!) drugs vs food we have to buy anyway. Your choice, nutrient packed whole foods vs junk. What's it gonna be? Wanna be happy? Can't be happy if you are not healthy, one of the more simple facts of life.

Nutrition is not as complicated as it's made out to be: a balanced diet of whole foods nutrition is infinitely more effective than supplements. Can we live on supplements? Nope, but we can live on whole foods. But supplements are mostly benign, hundreds of studies show that on the whole they have no real effect on health positive or negative.

Pharma drugs however are very destructive to health. How do we know this?  To repeat: we spend massively more on pharma than any other country in the world, and we have the worst health to show for it. And the dollar cost is extreme. If they worked better than good food perhaps the cost could be rationalized? But they don't work.

And yet we, on the whole, implicitly trust the health care industry. 

And when the ancillary industries are included, big "food", chemical (pesticides, herbicides, fungicides), insurance, and yes Wall St too, they all collect massive profits from the source of misery called pharmacology.

Bottom line? The aggregate murder for profit number is truly astonishing, and nearly unimageable.

And yet we, on the whole, implicitly trust the health care industry. 

How do these industries get away with it? It's a complex answer that includes an almost religious faith in technology, and new technologies. It is a collective unconscious bias of our age. Unconscious bias is also related to "magical thinking", which is endemic to human thinking since the search for the fountain of youth. We want the magic pill that solves all problems.

That pill does not exist, and yet it is an easy sell. 

There is an actual fountain of youth, but it only involves certain diet and lifestyle choices that cost nothing. So big pharma and it's ancillaries assiduously ignore it. In fact they actively work to divert us from the knowledge of it. They know all they have to do is keep us confused about nutrition to get away with murder.