Posted on 05/09/2016 7:13:29 AM PDT by SatinDoll
Oh yes it is.
"My parents were just vacationing in Europe (they go often so they're aware of how stuff works). My mom is diabetic and had a shortage of insulin while in France, they went to the drugstore and she showed the bottle of Humalog which is what she uses in the United States and the price in the United States is around $240 a bottle which is charged to her Medicare and insurance and can only be prescribed by her doctor."
"The pharmacist recognized the bottle and without having to go to a doctor sold her a bottle of insulin for US $25.00."
"This is the same brand made by Eli Lilly that she gets in the United States and why in the in the world that should be 1/10 of the price without having to go to the doctor for a prescription."
[Quoted with permission.]
Note this well folks: No prescription needed and 1/10th the price for the exact same drug.
Now fill your suitcase and bring same home with you and you'll go to prison. Note that you're not counterfeiting anything, you're not adulterating anything and you lawfully own that which you're bringing into the country for the purpose of nothing other than making a profit.
If this price-fixing, which is supposed to be a felony under 15 USC was to be stopped then the drug would cost $25/bottle -- or slightly more, since of course the person bringing it would like to make a profit -- here.
Even with a reasonable profit -- say, $5/bottle -- it would still collapse the price in the United States instantly.
Is it all drugs? No, definitely not, but the same issue applies to both procedures and supplies.
Put a stop to the racket and the cost of obtaining medical care, whether it be drug, device, service or procedure will drop like a stone. Further, no new laws are actually necessary since between 15 USC and state consumer protection laws are plenty-sufficient on their own. The entire rubric of "must buy insurance or be bankrupted by any material medical emergency" certainly fits the definition of a force-tied sale that also facially appears to be unlawful under that very same body of law.
You have been and are today being robbed with the explicit cooperation and assistance of the Federal and State governments folks. If it is not stopped now these practices will, within the next few years, consume the entirety of the Federal Budget at which point our economy and probability political system will collapse.
Many plaints from long term care to medical professional diagnoses, on to lifestyle and activities, but it all boils down to big pharma and not doctors (constrained by government payout programs), insurance companies (hog tied to ‘benefit the least among us), and personal nutrition choices (do we blame Rachel Ray)?
Notice I didn’t even mention the dozens of daytime TV scumbag bottom dweller lawyers we see everyday hawking their services to sue the shit out of ‘big pharma’ for you.
If you stay in the hospital one night after a tonsillectomy, insurance or Medicare will pay $3000 for that one night. But if you are paying for the same thing in the form of a one night stay after a facelift, the hospital will charge the recreational patient just $300.
Obamacare needs repealed.
To replace it, just deregulate all markets related to health care. Prices will be much more reasonable once the free market drives prices down.
Trump has said as much, but he is scoffed at for not having a serious plan for health care reform.
Sometimes just allowing the market to work its magic is the best "plan" of all.
Maybe the reason both left and right wing politicians hate Trump so much is that they fear the Health Care Gravy Train is going to be dismantled by him.
My guess is the insurance-health care org-big pharma-cartel is probably (collectively) the biggest lobbyist/bribe agent in Washington.
It's easier to whine about evil big pharma than to learn about the truth behind the price differentials.
Liberals (and way too many conservatives) are taken in by simplistic, Stage One thinking.
I have no idea what you just said.
The profanity does not help make whatever point you were pretending to make
Tge pharmaceutical companies run what we call health care. There is not any real living to be made from healthy people. Not on the scale that pharmaceutical companies, insurance and doctors make from sick people It’s why they shut out health care.
Obamacare is nothing but government getting in on it. Politicians tgat is
I recently had a simple 5 minute procedure done, I was told I needed 3 treatments.
My insurance carrier was billed $750.00 for each of these very simple procedures.
I was appalled
You refuse to relent that it isn’t just the ‘big pharma’ you obviously hate. I gave you multiple examples of intervening factors, but your bottom line is “big pharma” bad. Done here with you fella.
What? No
It’s a bizarre racket
Take the vaunted blue pill viagra...slidenafil in generic
Retail just keeps skyrocketing to around 30-40 bucks per 100 mg pill
Yet if your urologist writes it for slidenafil 20 mg for cardio pulmonary hypertension it will cost aroun 10 bucks for 100 20 mg pills at Sams or 50 cents for the exact same dose 5x20 of the exact generic equivalent
They still do not have an ED viagra generic brand
Now on to symbicort which is not generic yet here...copd or asthma steroid
240 bucks cash money for 1-2 months
I buy them from Portugal or India via 911.com for 18 bucks each
And they work great
We as Americans pay for the world medicine literally
Humalog came out in 1996. It is insulin variant produced with recombinant technology. The patent should be expiring. But it is doubtful that the price will go down to $25. People excuse high drug prices in the US as the price of drug development and testing. But we also pay for corruption and a captive marketplace.
Why do you call it stealing? Appears to me it is a function of the fine print.
I could not agree more.
You want to lower non-catastrophic health costs? Get rid of non-catastrophic health insurance. Let everyone have a Health Savings Account that rolls over and stays with you wherever you go - to have a fund to pay for their own non-catastrophic healthcare costs.
You watch the cost go down.
In Canada, Tylenol-3 (aka Norco, Tylenol + Codeine) is available without prescription, you just have to ask the Pharmacist for it (it’s kept behind the counter).
Over here, Doc gives you more than 1 refill, the DEA starts sniffing their prescribing “schedule narcotics”. . .
“And yet the US has worse healthcare as measured by health and longevity and especially cost than those socialist countries.”
Not when you compare similar demographics.
Norwegians in the U.S. do pretty well, I understand.
Another problem with such comparisons are the diseases of affluence. Food is much, much more expensive in Europe than it is in the United States.
You have to take into consideration the enormous overhead of U.S. companies. Campaign contributions account for a large part of the price.
Not true.
Yes you get kicked out of a study by violating the protocol for which you agreed to follow. I've kicked a number of people off of various studies for behaviors they thought "they could get away with it". Such as violating dietary restrictions or taking other banned drugs during the study.
There are huge reasons for Sponsors to know if the new compound is going to work or not. If you can determine early on that a drug is not going to work as expected you can save a lot of $$$ from going down the tube.
It's obvious you don't understand why the prices are lower in other countries compared to here.
Why don't you give your explanation and I'll point out your errors.
I had a cosmetic procedure at one of our local hospitals. No overnight stay but 5 hrs in the OR plus the use of their nurses and recovery room. $3400. I paid cash. The only thing that wasn’t included in that price was my doctor.
I have no idea what they would charge insurance but can use a procedure hubby had done 1 yr before at one of our local surgery centers. A colon procedure was billed to his insurance at $34,000.
Probably more to the story that it seems. Bottom line, we need to have transparency and discussion instead of secret deals.
The US is subsidizing all the single payer countries.
Precisely.
We give government aid to the rest of the world, we subsidize their drugs, their food. The American taxpayer gets stuck with the bill in so many ways you can't keep track.
Having said that I'm sure those other countries don't have Lawyer commercials fishing for a class action lawsuit. The Big Pharm companies have to build in the cost of a probable lawsuit into their drugs.
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