PPO, DDO, CMO, PPD, PPC, CPM, CPC, ACO…
POS… FML…
I checked the price of a prescription that I take daily on the global markets. Average cost per dose outside the U.S…. $0.54. U.S. price? Anyone… Bueller… Bueller…? $4.17.
Let’s up the ante.
$540.00… $4,170.00
The U.S. version doesn’t come with any added benefits. It’s not challenging to get this drug into the hands of its patients. It’s in high demand but without any limitation on production… so in essence, a product that has both high supply and demand… a stable market platform by any means, even after the folks who invented are paid their fair share. (Do NOT get me wrong here: Finding a miracle drug or solution is as likely as Powerball tickets, so to the extent a pharmaceutical company spends to find these needles in the haystacks, they are due their fair share and reward. I do remain, at heart, a capitalist and believe a free-private market is a healthy means to innovation…)
I guess where I am going is… I’m supposed to be grateful that my health insurance only makes me pay $20, but this is after I already shelled out premiums that, in a single month, cost more than an entire year OR a 90-day supply at my co-pay? Even that is funny… “co-pay”… so you pay a little, I pay a little, what am I paying you to do again? I tell ya what I’ll co-pay: my mortgage. Or I’ll co-pay my taxes…
This isn’t a debate about Obamacare vs. privatized healthcare. This is a just one of those moments in time where you just scratch your head and wonder how did we get here? How did we ever get to a place like this?
You can’t even point a finger at this point. We’ve got finance analysts dictating what the appropriate usage of drugs are for and their price, depending on the means of their application.
Let me throw one at ya: I wanted to quit smoking… Zyban, generic Bupropion… used for mild depression and for smoking cessation as prescribed by your physician. However, prescribed for smoking cessation, you pay the piper at roughly $4.00+ a dose. For depression? $20.00 co-pay… why? Did it cost any more to manufacture? Is it any less effective for either treatment?
Let’s go one further. 1947 total bill for delivering a baby: $70.00…
Seventy dollars.
Even adjusted for inflation in today’s economy… that would be $700 and change…
Today’s average cost of baby delivery? $15,000…
I bring this up because this is for something humans have been doing for tens of thousands of years. While yes, I will agree we have made giant strides to the mortality rate of newborns, I still wonder… where’s the money actually going?
I haven’t done my homework, but everything has a beginning, and somewhere in that food chain is the first artificially-inflated and egregious fee. A fee that sets the butterfly effect in motion that turns a $.50 drug into a $4+ drug for merely having been prescribed. And that’s even if you have insurance and can afford it.
God forbid we even begin to address the Mental Health Sector. I see increasingly alarming trends that point to a growing epidemic with only escalating costs.
I fear for our future in that I see not a single attempt at a reasonable solution to attempt to right a simple fundamental flaw in the equation. We as a people have allowed it to escalate to the point of multi-billion dollar class-action suits against pharma companies and to medical malpractice against the caregiver who possibly wasn’t allowed to prescribe a drug to the patient or provide the necessary treatment. But in the end, it doesn’t matter—somebody is being charged somewhere, and that charge starts with you… that is, of course, if you can afford it.
