My wife and I are both almost 66. We have not taken any prescription drugs in well over a decade. And when I DID get shoulder surgery and they gave me some really powerful stuff as a pain killer (Ocycontin), I took none of it. It simply didn’t really hurt that much and I didn’t want to mess up my system.
Plus, the street value was way too high. :)
Let the free market capitalists of the medical industrial complex begin their conspicuously biased claims.
Medicine is nearly inelastic to price because it provides life. Thank tricky dick and his buddy george kiaser for allowing it to be for profit across the board. Even the not-for-profits have cashed in now.
I buy an anti-fungal nail gel from my podiatrist. $40 for the 10 ml bottle.
Outrageous you say?
Not so fast. I can order it from Walgreens and potentially have it covered with my Medicare Drug Plan. But there is no guarantee it will be covered and if it isn’t it will cost me $300.
Yes, $300.
I asked the podiatrist how that can possibly justified. All she could offer was that for reasons not known Walgreens did not buy directly from the manufacturer. They had to buy from a third party.
But $300? Give me a break. I handed her the $40 for the 10 ml bottle.
BTW, there 1000 ml in a liter - a bit over a quart. That would yield 100 bottles of my gel.
$4000 per liter at $40.
$30,000 per liter at $300.
What a business.
This is a well written analysis of the Big Pharma scam.
Big Pharma is a major donor to political campaigns and the Congress critters on both sides of the aisle do not want to cut off their ‘sugar daddy’. Which explains why the Congressional RINOs were so reluctant to totally gut Obamacare when they had the opportunity in 2017-18.
Our son’s MIL is a doctor. I asked her about the ‘knock-offs’ - generic drugs that are supposed to be ‘exactly the same’ as the original. I had gotten some eye drops that were generic and opted to spend $200 for the original.
Generics can be manufactured ANYWHERE - they make them in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Mexico, and other s&%^-holes. They also make them in Israel, Canada, the US. AND they are protected from being sued!!
Your pharmacist will know, but they are often reluctant to cough it up. You can research it online from the label and find out.
For me, if I were taking an important medicine, I’d darned sure want to know if it were made in Bangladesh or Canada.
Go Trump.
>>> In truth, the Canadians may be a lot smarter negotiators than we are.<<<
No. Other nations fix service/drug prices to fit their “free healthcare” models. The drug manufacturers higher US prices subsidize the rest of the world. Just like employer sponsored health insurance subsidizes Medicare and Medicaid plans. It’s all f’d up.
Products that are critical for life itself are meted out by patent-protected monopolies. Unregulated monopolies inevitably become inefficient and grossly expensive.
**********
Marxist drivel under the guise of supporting Trump:
1. A patent by definition creates a monopoly over the life of the patent. You don’t like patents? What’s your solution for drug development? Before you complain about the evil crony capitalists, try going without all the useful drugs whose parents have expired, drugs that would not exist without the patent system. A case can be made that patent protection lasts too long and creates needless
snares for generic manufacturers, but most of the usel drugs in the world were developed under the existing system. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.
2. Our drug companies must bear not only government imposed development costs, where a fresh look at their need is necessary, but our firms must cope with a tort system of legalized plunder. You need to subtract this cost from the huge profits that the drug companies allegedly earn.
3. You resent that drug companies charge foreigners less than Americans? If they do, it’s because foreign governments regulate their prices, thereby allowing their citizens to freeload off of our development and tort costs. What’s your solution? If they refuse to sell to foreigners at reduced prices, they lose whatever they can make from these sales,
the socialists attack them as greedy, and people like you listen. If they reduce prices for Americans to the levels charged to foreigners, they don’t cover the costs of bringing them to market and fighting-off tort lawyers.
Gordon Chang, a superb voice on the China Trade, says Pres. Trump is doing the right thing...the Free Market should stand with Trump on this.
Do a web search for “Pharmacy/CoPay/Insurance Clawback”.
The other way it is evident that the major pharmaceutical companies do not really give a twit about free markets is they have no problem at all paying government dictated prices in other economies all over the world, primarily because they know they can subsidize those discounted prices by getting whatever they want in the U.S. market.
No, I am not for “government rigged” prices but the major drug makers obviously don’t have a problem with it.
The U.S. needs to make government rigged drug prices the problem of the major pharmaceutical companies.
How?
A simple rule that does not dictate specific drug prices but instead turns the government dictated prices the drug makers agree to into a problem that weighs on what prices they can charge in the U.S. That simple rule would make the price limit for a drug in the U.S. as no greater than the medium price for that drug that the manufacturer has accepted in the government rigged markets it provides the drug to.
However much they agree to discount a drug to meet other governments’ price fixing, they would have to do no more, and no less of a discount in the U.S. market than the median of all the discounts it offered elsewhere.
Whether they had to exit a market (with a particular drug) or bring the U.S. price into the median of its discounted prices, either way the U.S. drug prices would go down. They’d even go down in the former case because they’d no longer be making the slimmed down revenue margins they get in the government rigged markets, so the U.S. prices would not have to subsidize those lower profit margins.