COMMENTARIES

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. 

Writing in Health Affairs,  John Goodman says there are a number of ways to make HSAs available to more people and to serve more needs. Included:

1. Roth-type HSAs for seniors on Medicare.
2. Roth HSAs for people who buy insurance in the exchanges.
3. Use of HSAs to obtain 24/7 “direct primary care.”
4. HSAs for chronic care.

Here are four surprising facts: (1) the subject on which there is the most disinformation is “taxes”; (2) almost all the disinformation comes from the left; (3) it is spread to the general public by the mainstream media; and (4) it is almost never fact-checked. More.