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posted by
martyb
on Tuesday August 23 2016, @07:34AM
from the staying-alive-is-getting-more-expensive dept.
from the staying-alive-is-getting-more-expensive dept.
EpiPen's price has ballooned about 400% since 2008, rising from about a $100 list price to $500 today. The EpiPen is one of the most important life-saving medical innovations for people with severe food allergies—which affect as many as 15 million Americans and 1 in 13 children in the United States. But its price has exploded over the last decade despite few upgrades to the product itself. The product's lack of competitors is likely a significant driver of the costs. [...] [The] EpiPen enjoys a near-monopoly on the market with annual sales of more than $1.3 billion and nearly 90% U.S. market share.
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EpiPen's Price Increased 400% since 2008
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Logicians have but ill defined
As rational the human kind.
Logic, they say, belongs to man,
But let them prove it if they can.
-- Oliver Goldsmith
(Score: 4, Interesting) by theluggage on Tuesday August 23 2016, @10:34AM
Fortunately, my insurance covers them.
Ding! We have a reason! This is the problem with any form of "insurance" in a "free" market - sellers charge what the market will bear and the lion's share of the market is "insurance companies". Not only can insurers bear sky-high prices, but they actually have an incentive to encourage them: if medical supplies are impossible for most people to afford without insurance, then, tadah! more people have to buy insurance. The insurance company doesn't care about absolute cost as long as its predictable - they just raise their premiums to match, and all their competitors are paying for the same products so they have no advantage. For that matter, I don't think the people selling insurance give a flying fuck about the value of future payouts - they're paid for selling policies and all the risk gets packaged and commoditised and resold on down the line.
Obviously there's a similar danger if the government is paying, but governments are rather more accountable for sky-high healthcare bills - taxpayers care if their money is being wasted, shareholders only care about the value of their shares & dividends, which are fine as long as money is flowing.
Of course, if the government was paying insurers to cover people then you'd have the absolute worst of both worlds, but obviously no civilised country would be so batshit insane as to set up a ridiculous scheme like that...
(Score: 2) by scruffybeard on Tuesday August 23 2016, @12:08PM
I would be shocked if your insurance company was paying $700 for them. I get routine blood work twice a year. The bill from the lab is usually about $150, but the insurance pays about $6, with no additional co-pays from me. Similar thing from the dentist. He might bill $200 for a filling, the insurance knocks it down to $120, which I split 80-20 with the insurance company.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday August 23 2016, @03:41PM
I would be shocked if your insurance company was paying $700 for them. I get routine blood work twice a year. The bill from the lab is usually about $150, but the insurance pays about $6, with no additional co-pays from me.
THIS. Many people don't realize how much "insurance" really translates to "negotiated private deals with medical services/groups/suppliers." You go to the doctor and they bill you for "$200," but the only person who pays the $200 is the person without insurance. One insurance company pays $160, another pays $122, another pays $64, one lucky one pays only $40, or whatever. But then you receive the statement that the "$200 bill is settled."
The first time you see this, most people react with, "Huh?"
In reality, the doctor's office "charges" a number higher than it knows any reasonable insurer would pay. That way they get the maximum money out of everyone. And the person who is screwed the most is the person without insurance.
Same thing happens with medication, where insurers have deals with pharmacies and drug companies. I'm sure it's true here.
Important tip: Try to negotiate medical bills -- if you offer to pay cash quickly, you may be able to score a discount similar to insurance companies. (It helps if you have an idea of how much a private insurer would actually pay, but that's hard to find out.) Also, shop around for medication. Your "insurance" may NOT be giving you the best deal. A few years ago I needed a generic medication for a family member, and the "preferred pharmacy" the insurance recommended required paying a $16 co-pay for a 30-day supply. Then I went to the local grocery store pharmacy, and they offered the same generic drug at $10 for a 90-day supply (with no insurance). The system is completely messed up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @05:23PM
Even people without insurance don't pay full price, if they are smart. When I didn't have insurance, I would go to the doctor and just ask, "how much do I need to pay in cash, right now, to make this bill go away?" Almost always, I'd get at least a 60 percent discount as an initial offer. I'd always remind the office manager, who was almost always called by the desk jockey, that they were better off just taking my money now, then wasting it dealing with insurance or collections headaches.
Of course, the real way to fix this is to require doctor offices to do what every other business has to do: post their prices ahead of time so you can compare prices BEFORE you go. You'd be amazed what real competition can do. You already see this with the various retail clinics that have began to pop up. The nearby doctor's price for strep tests dropped by an order of magnitude after the nearby pharmacy started offering them.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @12:42PM
Our corporate insurance rep come in the other month to go over a new policy. One employee started ranting about Obamacare and "fuckin Obama" at the end of the meeting. The rep flat out told my coworker "The insurance and drug companies are screwing you, not Obama." He quickly explained how Obamacare was stonewalled until a version written by the drug and insurance companies was passed. He also said a single payer system was certainly a better way to go even though it would be the end of his job. And this man has been selling insurance for over 20 years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @01:23PM
Yeah. It's surprising to me how many people can have the capacity for cognitive dissonance and immunity to information that leads them to still blame the ACA. Maybe it's the same utterly retarded tribalism that has people calling it Obamacare years after it's a done deal! People that absolutely thought that every provision of the ACA was a good idea. But OMG anything but Obamacare!
The person who negotiates our insurance every year is one such pants-on-head stupid dipshit. Any complaints anybody has about the plan she chose this year? Don't blame me, blame Obama!
One would have to be a complete and utter fucking born-yesterday naïve retarded Zika baby to have not figured out exactly why costs are out of control by now.
Americans are fucking idiots. I hope they keep shouting #1! #1! #1! when they're all subsistence farmers getting food aid from China.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @02:22PM
While wearing "Make America Great Again" hats.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday August 23 2016, @03:14PM
Personally, I still call it Romneycare, since he was the one that first proposed it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 23 2016, @02:29PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @03:48PM
Doubt he had much choice - the single payer thing was never going to get passed ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Health_Care_Act#Timeline [wikipedia.org] ). Obamacare is actually still a bit better than going with the flow. Seriously the USA healthcare system was so broken that something like Obamacare actually made it better in many ways (more got coverage).
The prices of medical care were still high before Obamacare and fewer people were covered.
And if you look at the insurance companies they have an incentive to sabotage Obamacare whenever they can: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/08/20/1626228 [soylentnews.org]
If US voters blame Obama for going for lesser evil instead of "voting" for something actually good, they should look at themselves. I see plenty of US voters voting for Hillary Clinton merely to avoid Donald Trump and vice-versa.
They shouldn't be surprised when they get what they vote for, or when the People's Representatives end up too representative of the People ;).
(Score: 2) by aclarke on Tuesday August 23 2016, @02:12PM
If insurance is the reason, why are they more like $100-150 here in Canada? At least in Ontario, OHIP doesn't cover medication, so we have to pay out of pocket for medicine here if we don't have insurance to cover it. If the complete answer is "because insurance" then they'd be a similar price in Canada to what they are in the US.
The answer here isn't "get rid of insurance". Maybe it's get rid of the "free" market and introduce regulations to limit corporate greed and protect citizens. In the end, I don't pretend to know the right answer either. But after experiencing the American health care system for close to a decade, I sure am glad to be back in Canada. I mean, American care is pretty good, as long as you have bulletproof insurance...
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday August 23 2016, @04:49PM
If insurance is the reason, why are they more like $100-150 here in Canada?
You mean, in Canada (where at least part of healthcare is public and the government makes the occasional gesture towards regulating industry) why is it somewhere between the US price (where you need insurance to pay for doctors, operations, ambulances, hospital beds etc. and the entire system is run for the benefit of the insurers) and the UK price (where you don't need insurance at all*)?
Sounds about right.
(* flat rate of £8 per prescription capped at a bit over £100/year total, unless you qualify for free prescriptions).