The FDA wants ads to have more warnings about risks and side effects. RFK, Jr. wants to abolish the ads altogether. Yet, our most important health care problem is not that people are taking too many prescription drugs. They are taking too few. We get our highest return on money we spend on drugs (versus doctors, hospitals, etc.). We do not have too many ads. We have too few. More.
This occurs for three reasons: traditional Medicare requires three separate insurance plans for comprehensive coverage; traditional Medicare drug plans are required to community rate, without adequate risk adjustment; and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) are able to calculate patients’ coinsurance based on list prices, rather than on the actual discounted prices the PBM pays the manufacturers. In addition, beneficiaries in all Medicare plans will pay more for drugs and drug insurance because the IRA removes more than $300 billion of government funding from Medicare Part D over 10 years—leaving the market with no alternative but to shift costs to beneficiaries. More.
Although Big Pharma and big business agree on the end result (people get the lifesaving drugs they need), they don’t always agree on who should bear the bulk of the cost. Enter the politicians to tilt the scale. A bipartisan push would allow drug companies to sell brand-name drugs at monopoly prices for virtually all patients with employer-provided health insurance. The result would be higher drug company profits and lower employee wages. More.
More than half of all seniors in Medicare obtain health insurance from a private Medicare Advantage plan. Yet many on the left are hostile to these plans. Yet this hostility is misplaced. A new study finds that the migration of people from traditional Medicare to the Medicare Advantage program over the last decade has saved the federal government $144 billion. More.
In 2011, Tom Saving and John Goodman pointed out in Health Affairs that Medicare was setting 6 billion prices on any given day. Writing at Forbes, Goodman says that today that number has almost doubled — to 11 billion. And the way Medicare pays, is the way employers and insurance companies also pay. Of all the things that are bad about our health care system, this probably should rank near the top. Yet it rarely gets the attention it deserves. See: What’s Wrong with the Way We Pay Doctors?
Even though the United States has the most expensive health care system in the world, we have fewer doctors per capita than most other developed countries, and they are seeing patients less often.. The average wait to see a new doctor in this country is 3½ weeks. At the worst-performing hospitals, one in ten visitors to the emergency room leave without ever receiving medical attention – apparently because they get tired of waiting. Solutions: Let nurses practice to the top of their training and open new avenues for foreign-trained doctors and medical school graduates without residencies. More.
The common perception among commentators and pundits was that the Democratic National Convention was devoid of any focus on issues. There was a lot of joy. But very little substance. Except for one rather remarkable exception. As the Wall Street Journal put it, “the delegates united in blaming corporate greed for high prices.” As Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell wrote, “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” There is just one problem. There is no such thing as an economic theory of inflation – including high grocery prices — that is based on greed. More.