15 June 2018

Drugs and Money (and the High Cost of Health Insurance)

My asthma medication retails for $400 a month. Thank god I have health insurance.

The medication contains two ingredients, developed in the 1990s and the 1970s, that if sold separately, would be long out of trademark and available for pennies a dose.

But big pharma is manipulating medication availability so that they can rake in big bucks by finding ways to create new combinations in new delivery hardware to keep medications under trademark for decades.

USAToday reported two years ago what the CEOs of some of the pharmaceutical companies were getting paid:
AstraZeneca, the manufacturer of the medication I take, isn’t on this list, but its CEO, Pascal Soriot, made $13.4 million in 2016.

I have no idea what my health insurance company is paying for the medication after my $25 copay, though I suspect they're negotiating some kind of discount. Health insurers' CEO salaries have spiked in recent years, and they too are pulling in millions of dollars:
Salaries in millions of dollars, 2016
There are a lot of reasons why health care costs in the United States are spiraling out of control. One of them is that big pharma and health insurance companies are tossing the ball back and forth in an orgy of greed, while passing on increasingly high prices to consumers in the form of higher policy costs, higher deductibles, and higher co-pays.

Making people ration health care because they can't afford it is terrible policy. It often leads to higher health care costs down the road. The only way to stop this is to take the profit motive out of the picture.


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