And when the physician does’t care and the patient doesn’t care… we wind up in eEpiPenj discussions that only talk about out-of-pocket as if that’s the ONLY thing that matters.
On a slight side note here, there’s also an “interesting” problem with insulin. Often when the administrator changes on the prescription plan, they change which drugs are available and at what price, and then we all go to dance around changing prescriptions and making sure ongoing meds are still available and affordable.
I think I’ve mentioned before I have a friend, type 1, who has a pump and she’s had to change the pump twice I think due to this. At game night this last weekend, she also informed me that the insulin itself became a problem for her this year. She went to pick up her usual, ongoing, every day prescription, but the paperwork was wrong that the employees were given and the pharmacy asked her for 1800 dollars.
Now I understand there was some sort of mistake here but… she has to have insulin to live. She’s used this pharmacy for years, and you’d think they’d have some sort of tracking system that says hey this persons cost went up by several factors and maybe we should check to make sure they know that.
So why did she have to call her physician to see if they had any extras to hold her over, because these insulin drugs don’t have generics, so they can’t just switch to the one that is covered. They need to a new prescription for the other drug, which the insurance company doesn’t cover for that pharmacy, so she has to switch that too, and since she orders in advance and ongoing… she’ll need two prescription, one for the immediate need and one the presumably year out.
I don’t have anything that expensive or drastic yet, but who knows my ongoing could suddenly become someone’s cash cow any day now! But I am tired of having my pharmacy plan change every. single. year. It makes ongoing medications kind of a pain to get in order.
My take has long been that markets need some rules and referees, and that most regulations arise out of market abuses (kind of like rules in football, such as the Holy Roller play by the Raiders left us with the no advancing a fumble forward by your own team late in the game). However, the Pharmaceutical market is one which needs a lot of regulation, due to the desire to both get cheap drugs, and keep new products coming to market. Lately we’ve seen these issues, and I don’t know if there’s a good solution - the market is ripe for abuse (see epi-pens, etc.) in part due to regulations (many of them written by the pharmaceutical companies themselves), and the way that the limited monopolies are regulated in the industry.
Oh noes. Poor rich guy suddenly realizes he might suffer consequences for his actions, despite all that money he has! Man, this hits me right in the feels.
What a shithead. Hopefully the judge isn’t bought and paid for. Wow…just wow.
He is a “caring intellectual” who’s helped find cures for diseases that afflict kids, Brafman said of Shkreli. But he’s is plagued by “personal demons hell bent on self-destruction,” the lawyer added.
Prison consultant Joel Sickler said in court papers that while Shkreli would ordinarily be eligible to serve his time in a minimum-security federal camp that resembles “an austere college campus,” officials will instead place him in a higher-security facility because of his threat against Clinton.
That will mean Shkreli will be housed in a crowded prison filled with felons who’ve been convicted of violent crimes ranging from racketeers, drug cartel leaders and sex offenders, all posing a threat to what Sickler called Shkreli’s “fragile mental state.”
I have to admit that lawyers sure now how to pretzel he was an arrogant prick who showed no respect for the public, his investors or the patients his drugs went to into somehow a scared little boy who didn’t know what he was doing so he shouldn’t go to “pound-me-in-the-ass prison.” Thank you Office Space for that permanent memory.
I’d be pretty scared too to go to a place like that.
