Forget this.
Forget this. You want to know one of the places health care costs increase? Middle persons. Like the companies that find it so profitable to be a go-between amongst drug manufacturers and insurance companies, employers, health plans, the government - the pharmacy benefit managers. No company exists or gets that big without making money. Which means money is coming out of patients' pockets and going into a lot of other pockets besides just the pharmacy where they get the medicine, and the manufacturer who made the medicine.
In this case, the free market is not making the drugs more available, adding to the funds for R&D for new or better drugs, and it is certainly not bringing prices down. If you've got a solution other than regulation and shutting all the pbms and just having the government negotiate the prices, it better be a good one.
Insulin has been around for a very long time. We've been able to synthesize insulin for a long time. What exactly has happened since 2011 that the price of insulin has suddenly gone up exponentially? I'd love to hear it if it's anything other than greed.
P.S. If you can negotiate a 40-60% decrease in the price of a drug and still make a profit as the middleperson, that is an over-priced drug. This is garbage.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/insulin-price-hike-lawsuit-accuses-drug-makers-of-conspiring/
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/insulin-price-hike-lawsuit-accuses-drug-makers-of-conspiring/
In this case, the free market is not making the drugs more available, adding to the funds for R&D for new or better drugs, and it is certainly not bringing prices down. If you've got a solution other than regulation and shutting all the pbms and just having the government negotiate the prices, it better be a good one.
Insulin has been around for a very long time. We've been able to synthesize insulin for a long time. What exactly has happened since 2011 that the price of insulin has suddenly gone up exponentially? I'd love to hear it if it's anything other than greed.
P.S. If you can negotiate a 40-60% decrease in the price of a drug and still make a profit as the middleperson, that is an over-priced drug. This is garbage.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/insulin-price-hike-lawsuit-accuses-drug-makers-of-conspiring/
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/insulin-price-hike-lawsuit-accuses-drug-makers-of-conspiring/
Well, have a talk with the politicians, because they throw it around a lot.
ReplyDeleteThe problem, Evans said, is patients who have high deductibles or little or no insurance don’t get those discounted prices.
ReplyDeleteWait. Does that mean that deductible payments are based on full retail price, rather than on this net price?! So an insurer is taking in say 600 bucks in deductible while paying 300 to the pharma people?
That's another one of those "how is this even legal" things.
Our system is inscrutable and inexplicable. One argument against gov't involvement is they tend to over-complicate and over-regulate, and not necessarily fix the problems. Meanwhile, the businesses involved are businesses, not charities.
ReplyDeleteMy guess, although I have not looked that up for this particular instance, is that investors with money saw opportunities and have been raising prices on everything, including things that had long since gone off-patent and had been dirt cheap meds since the 90's.
The gov't, meanwhile, had gotten stupid and still thinks generics are magic drug-price lowering and medication access increasing options. Obs not anymore.
So now, when everyone thought they had the magic solution, 2-3 decades later we have an even worse problem. Yippee. People are cheaper dead.
Um, money? Convincing people they need you as a middleperson has been a time-honored way to make money, whatever the specifics. I mean, sometimes it's because there's some challenging aspect to making arrangements that could genuinely be facilitated by someone focusing on just that section of the process. But usually it's an opportunity to make money.
ReplyDeletePlus, we all have been told that outsourcing practically everything is cheaper. I suppose it could also be one of those collusion/not collusion things where it turns out to be a convenient way to obfuscate so people keep the middleperson around for just such an emergency.