/r/4chan and /r/classic4chan get the “best” of it but yes, some of those image caps even have big arrows joining it all together because to someone new its unintelligible. Which i forget. I should have added a tl;dr
I find the subreddits akin to visiting the zoo. Stand behind the glass and watch the animals frolicking. Well, watch the monkeys fling shit at each other.
So… this Shkreli guy supposedly is hunting around for rare Magic: The Gathering cards…
Heh.
I’m surprised this thread didn’t pop back up already for this. Mylan Pharmaceuticals, CEO Heather Bresch, raised the price of the standard 2-unit pack of EpiPen injectors to $608 from around $100. To make matters more awkward, Helen Bresch is the daughter of Democrat senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
Bresch went on CNBC and said "“No one’s more frustrated than me.” regarding the price increase. The show’s host incredulously fired back, “How can you be frustrated? You’re the one that raised the price!” Bresch went on to half-assedly blame the insurance system by saying it’s their fault that the consumer doesn’t know what the price of drugs are when they go up to the counter. (Like, WTF?) She ended by pledging to issue rebates to patients in need. Most detractors say this is insufficient because it means the price will still be paid by everyone else either by insurance premiums or taxes.
Here’s the thing. Bresch is kind of right to blame the system. Because Medicare cannot legally negotiate for better prices, her and shitheads like Shkreli, can do this kind of crap. The only thing keeping them in check is public backlash.
I think the House chair that decides if prices can be negotiated has already stated this will not change. I don’t know how they can possibly justify that.
Here’s the kicker:
http://usuncut.com/class-war/epipen-taxpayer-money/
So the drug costs less than a dollar to produce (in the quantiites used in an EpiPen). The device was developed using DoD funding. This company created neither the drug, or the device. They increased their prices, adjusting for inflation, 450% in a decade.
The same company also got a big guaranteed contract, because of a law mandating that all schools stock EpiPens.
Oh and the drug degrades after a year, so must be purchased each year.
Greedy shitbags.
CEO about EpiPen, “Don’t have the playa, hate the game” basically
My favorite part is how the CEO tries to blame the move of patients to High Deductible plans as the real problem, not the fact that insurance companies and government payors have been paying outrageous prices all along… no no, it’s only a problem because people now know about it. This would be one of the reasons why insurance companies keep increasing deductibles. The cost of drugs like these are out of control, but only in the USA. They’re reasonable of course in other countries.
I love the photo that comes with the NYT article.
“I’m not a villain!” Said while sitting in her Trump chair.
But no, kids, single payer isn’t the answer!
Fuck these people. If they even are people by any reasonable definition.
Single Payer would not solve this. Did you see what i just said above you. Part of the reason they were able to do this so long without notice is the larger payors, not patients, were taking on this cost. Single payor only shifts whose paying not what they’re paying. It’s not like prices and costs disappear… you know that right? We’d have to adjust how the government deals with drug companies and that’s not SP.
I can’t fathom single payer passing w/o Medicare getting negotiating rights.
Well, okay, no, I can, because Conservatives are literally Satan, but you know what I mean.
Larger point is that insurance companies are worthless middle men leaches who solely exist to extract profit from the business of people keeping alive and healthy. If there was every an industry that had no goddamn reason to exist. …
Right. You can’t assume that’s a given. I think this is why single payer keeps dying and why I won’t vote for it or anyone who supports it. You can’t take our existing model and just say hey have the fed and states pay for everything… which would solve nothing. And… it does’t address the demand side at all… the supply. It’s not just drugs that have issue here. Surgical screws, yes surgical screw, implants in general and shortage of staff.
Single-payer without power to negotiate is absurd, but single-payer also means power to negotiate regardless of what congress says. If they decide which products to use, and which ones not to use, they have de-facto negotiating authority. The only way that could be hamstrung is if congress actually legislated “All people who need medication X can have it and single-payer authority Y must pay whatever drug company Z wants for it.”
At this stage, I would be more amazed by this not happening than by singlepayer actually happening.
P.S. Medical tests are really goddamn expensive. Anyone interested in an HJ?
No kidding. And thanks to the way medical insurance works, my local hospital here games the system to maximize payouts. By doing so, I ended up paying out a freak-ton of money for my wife’s simple blood tests when they were trying out some new meds.
It was silly. We got bill after bill after bill, each one from either some internal clinic or medical worker at the hospital. For each one, we had to pay a flat co-pay followed by a percentage of the remainder. Since they filed every appointment that way (which we didn’t know about for 6 months because they didn’t send us a bill until every little bill was processed by insurance, then they sent all 6 months of appointments to us as individual letters over the course of a few days), we ended up paying roughly $2700 more out of pocket than we would have if they billed each one as an appointment.
When I complained, they told me it’s how they had to do things. Each type of doctor and nurse is worth their own per-appointment negotiated rate. If they file a single appointment, the whole appointment is billed at the negotiated rate of the doctor’s office. But if they classify each step as its own location, they get to charge different negotiated rates to the insurance company. A family doctor may have a standard rate of $179 per visit plus $60 for a blood draw. If they classify the blood draw room in the hospital as a specialty blood draw “clinic”, they may be able to charge $300 instead of $60. Problem is, that means I get charged $30 co-pay for the doctor plus $50 for my specialty clinic co-pay. Then they have the doctor who analyzes the results, which they did as ANOTHER specialty clinic.
Needless to say, we are no longer using that doctor.
My wife and I had a Cadillac health insurance policy from Yahoo that is now costing us an arm and a leg via COBRA and we still have to go through so much bullshit with confused middlemen, miscommunication, incorrect billing, authorization hassles, etc., that my opinion is now “tear the whole damn system down and give us Canada already.” Not gonna happen I suppose, but the hidden costs in time and stress and frustration even in a top tier policy are nuts.
Or they could just legislate that “All people who need medication X can have it” and let patents and FDA approval do the heavy lifting of the “government must pay drug companies whatever the drug companies want” clause.
That’s what happened here: Epi-Pen is a patented applicator of an un-patented drug, epinephrine. There was a competing product (Auvi-Q) that helped keep EpiPen prices “reasonable”, but then the FDA pulled Auvi-Q approval due to safety concerns. There’s yet another alternative to EpiPen making its way through the regulatory pipeline, but until it reaches market a $609 EpiPen is the only game in town.
And this would not change simply because we have a single payer system here. It’s not just about the payor, it’s also about the supplier, and whether or not there is competition there or not, keeping in mind these drugs usually cost a lot less in other countries. And let’s not forget, Medicare and Medicaid do not cover every thing. Medicare and Medicaid also don’t cover costs. We might as well just shut our hospitals down now if that’s what people think the real answer is… You really think if we just spread that insurance to everyone that you’ll suddenly get their you want for “free”.
Everyone tries to simplify these ideals too much just to sell free healthcare, and not do the actual work behind the supply side. Again, drugs are not the only problem here, we also have a shortage of healthcare works, especially physicians in the general/family medicine field which pays less. Until I see serious considerations behind an SP system, there is no way I will support it. And I don’t know why we keep looking at Canada and Europe as if those are the only two options anyway.
You seem to be under the impression that supporters of single-payer, both among the populace and the politicians, are entirely unaware of the rampant, runaway costs of American healthcare.
There are two separate, but vital problems at hand. Healthcare cannot and should not be a for-profit enterprise. It’s the business of saving lives, man. Insurance companies must go eventually to assert this as fundamentally as possible. They are leeches on the system. Just as much, healthcare companies all along the “supply” chain are taking advantage of the current setup in every way imaginable, for instance, the doctor’s office as JFrazer described above and the manufacturers of medically rated screws as you did. This, of course, must be tackled as well.
That some idealistic internet yahoos don’t grasp or mention both continuously does nothing to debase the inherent value and immediate necessity of single payer. It’s part of a broader solution. . . in fact. . .
I suspect we do so because those are First World areas that almost universally have better healthcare costs, practices, and outcomes than we do in the US. That we’ve managed to stumble our way into relatively good (though recent figures like birth mortality rates argue not as good as it once was) healthcare while remaining hogtied by capitalist thought is a matter of luck at best, and that luck does not appear to plan on lasting.
And, of course, these other countries, with their different takes on collective bargaining, patent protection, and healthcare provision have managed to address both of the aforementioned key issues very well. I’m not sure why anyone wouldn’t look to them as a possible model for success.
I mean hey, if Bernie’s vagueness wasn’t to your taste, that’s cool. His focus was so narrow on “money in politics” and “wealth inequality” that a lot of his other policy proposals felt like progressive box-ticking as much as they did considered positions (though I’d argue that his website platform pages provided more detail than a lot of people assumed he had, but of course, not enough to actually run a country off of; but that’s true of just about any candidate’s platform).
But I don’t think throwing the baby out with the bathwater’s necessarily the right call. The current insurance-co-gutted system is doing no one any favors except insurance company CEOs and their investors. And when people’s lives are on the line, I think maybe we, as a nation, should be ready to make the collective sacrifice of a handful of corner office types’ lifestyle.
