5 ms·

I'm not surprised, there's some serious shenanigans on medicine pricing and insurances. Medicine prices are clearly inflated when you can buy at a huge discoun

by dudus 6y ago

I'm not surprised, there's some serious shenanigans on medicine pricing and insurances. Medicine prices are clearly inflated when you can buy at a huge discount using insurance, but then you can get apps like GoodRX, which is free and give you coupons that far exceed my insurance discount on every single time I had to fill a prescription. To the point that I don't even bother going through insurance anymore. I saved thousands on medicine by just checking on GoodRx before buying it.

ev1 6y ago
I'm curious who or what the end goal of GoodRx is. They pay for expensive ($$$$$$) cloud anti-bot/anti-scraping, captcha you after a few requests if you run adblock, they pay for extensive browser/device (attempting to reidentify a user across multiple devices/multiple browsers) fingerprinting services and Fastly. The site loads a dozen trackers, googletagmanager, branch, segment, what are they doing with this data? How much money are they spending handing out coupons? The coupons aren't unique or require a login, why go through all of this? All the services they use are "request demo / contact us for enterprise pricing", not free-to-sign-up SaaS either. Just who is paying for all this and with what?
- canada_dry 6y ago
  > what are they doing with this data? As a company selling via the internet it would be handy to know what drugs/prescriptions a prospective client (via fingerprinting) is taking... it would certainly change what/if I marketed to them. Of course the concept of retail companies having even the slightest access to a customer's medical/health/drug information for marketing purposes is a compelling plot for Black Mirror.
  - ev1 6y ago
    Amusingly, right as I read this reply, I get a chain of heavily-obfuscated JS loading with the text Please verify you are a human Access to this page has been denied because we believe you are using automation tools to browse the website. Please make sure that Javascript and cookies are enabled on your browser and that you are not blocking them from loading.
    - gruez 6y ago
      Weird. I don't get it even though I use VPN + firefox w/ resistfingerprinting
- dageshi 6y ago
  Usually coupon sites are very profitable because they signal immediate intent to purchase, I assume they have affiliate links for whoever they're providing coupons for, any kind of coupon site is usually in fierce competition. As for all the bot countermeasures, the reason for that isn't immediately obvious to me, I assume it must be due to that competition.
  - ev1 6y ago
    These are not clickable affiliate links; when you pick your pharmacy it gives you a PDF to print out and hand the pharmacist at time of (IRL) payment. There appears to be some tracking, as "Member ID" differs on each reload. I assume this is tied to cookies or fingerprints in the backend.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  Their end-game is collecting user data & collecting a referral fee when people use their "insurance". (The coupons generally are not actual coupons, they present as an insurance coverage policy & code that pharmacies use the same way they would your normal insurance card). That's how they make their money. Personally, for me, the data they can collect off of me when I go to their site is worth the ~$2,000 I save every month. (actually I don't have to use them: I am prudent, and part of my contingency planning for losing my job is to know exactly what expenses I could strip away, and how (and for how long) I could continue to pay for the bare essentials. GoodRx is part of that planning for the healthcare end of things)
  - ev1 6y ago
    As a European now living in the US, my first thought is that the $2,000 shouldn't even exist to be collected, especially by invasive data broker rent seekers.
    - ericmay 6y ago
      It’s collected (generally speaking) one way or another. Unfortunately right now it’s collected from the lower and middle classes, but no matter what you do drugs, treatments, doctors, hospitals, etc. cost money. It’s never, ever, ever “free”. If a drug costs $2,000/month there are probably some inefficiencies baked into the price, but even if it were $500/month, that $500 has to come from somewhere.
      - ericd 6y ago
        Probably some inefficiencies baked into the price? There are massive inefficiencies at every level. I probably wouldn't share this "it's the way it is because it has to be" reasoning if you've never looked into why US healthcare is as expensive as it is. For a decent overview: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/why-does-health-care-cost-so-m https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/why-does-health-care-co... "Just to give you one example, Duke University Hospital has 900 hospital beds and 1,300 billing clerks."
- bqe 6y ago
  > They pay for expensive ($$$$$$) cloud anti-bot/anti-scraping, captcha you after a few requests if you run adblock, they pay for extensive browser/device (attempting to reidentify a user across multiple devices/multiple browsers) fingerprinting services and Fastly. This sounds like a great anti-account takeover program. I imagine with all of the various compliance programs they have to deal with and the legal risk, these are prudent measures.
  - ev1 6y ago
    There is no registration or login.
- pkaye 6y ago
  GoodRx doesn't pay for the medicines. They just offer the copay discount cards already available from manufacturers. The manufacturers have a fake prices they use as a negotiating point with insurance companies to maximize their profit.
dmix 6y ago
Just like school tuition. The more gov subsidized debt that can't be bankrupted the more admins they keep hiring and the bigger the cost/shit rolls down hill. Combine that with a culture that overvalues all university diplomas as equal, while disregarding the economic opportunities of at least half of them are almost nil, and you have a great recipe for massive failure for a big percentage of the young population. The half baked social programs always do this. Same with how rent control in NYC and Toronto in the 1970s ended up significantly reducing the supply of low-income housing because it stopped incentivizing developers from building cheap houses in cities that had it (they just went elsewhere) while also ghettoizing a bunch of neighbourhoods because there was zero incentive to maintain buildings (which led to mass arsons in places like harlem). If you're going to socialize it either go all the way and nationalize it/fully fund it or find a way that doesn't fuck the citizens over (like these glorified schemes to hand money over to politicially-connected middlemen like big pharma and diploma mills). OR in most cases just let the market do it's job. Like letting generic drug makers take over markets way sooner, without the multitude of government protection rackets that protect big pharma (including FDAs giant backlog). Meanwhile (social) media blames capitalism for every expensive drug or tuition price... like it actually makes sense for ANY market to charge a working class person $1000/pill. These flaws seem so obvious to me but are repeated in so many western countries, not just the US. While blame goes in so many randomly misguided directions. Often heavily greased by the people who benefit from these schemes.

by dudus 6y ago

ev1 6y ago

I'm curious who or what the end goal of GoodRx is. They pay for expensive ($$$$$$) cloud anti-bot/anti-scraping, captcha you after a few requests if you run adblock, they pay for extensive browser/device (attempting to reidentify a user across multiple devices/multiple browsers) fingerprinting services and Fastly. The site loads a dozen trackers, googletagmanager, branch, segment, what are they doing with this data? How much money are they spending handing out coupons? The coupons aren't unique or require a login, why go through all of this? All the services they use are "request demo / contact us for enterprise pricing", not free-to-sign-up SaaS either. Just who is paying for all this and with what?

canada_dry 6y ago
> what are they doing with this data? As a company selling via the internet it would be handy to know what drugs/prescriptions a prospective client (via fingerprinting) is taking... it would certainly change what/if I marketed to them. Of course the concept of retail companies having even the slightest access to a customer's medical/health/drug information for marketing purposes is a compelling plot for Black Mirror.
- ev1 6y ago
  Amusingly, right as I read this reply, I get a chain of heavily-obfuscated JS loading with the text Please verify you are a human Access to this page has been denied because we believe you are using automation tools to browse the website. Please make sure that Javascript and cookies are enabled on your browser and that you are not blocking them from loading.
  - gruez 6y ago
    Weird. I don't get it even though I use VPN + firefox w/ resistfingerprinting
dageshi 6y ago
Usually coupon sites are very profitable because they signal immediate intent to purchase, I assume they have affiliate links for whoever they're providing coupons for, any kind of coupon site is usually in fierce competition. As for all the bot countermeasures, the reason for that isn't immediately obvious to me, I assume it must be due to that competition.
- ev1 6y ago
  These are not clickable affiliate links; when you pick your pharmacy it gives you a PDF to print out and hand the pharmacist at time of (IRL) payment. There appears to be some tracking, as "Member ID" differs on each reload. I assume this is tied to cookies or fingerprints in the backend.
ineedasername 6y ago
Their end-game is collecting user data & collecting a referral fee when people use their "insurance". (The coupons generally are not actual coupons, they present as an insurance coverage policy & code that pharmacies use the same way they would your normal insurance card). That's how they make their money. Personally, for me, the data they can collect off of me when I go to their site is worth the ~$2,000 I save every month. (actually I don't have to use them: I am prudent, and part of my contingency planning for losing my job is to know exactly what expenses I could strip away, and how (and for how long) I could continue to pay for the bare essentials. GoodRx is part of that planning for the healthcare end of things)
- ev1 6y ago
  As a European now living in the US, my first thought is that the $2,000 shouldn't even exist to be collected, especially by invasive data broker rent seekers.
  - ericmay 6y ago
    It’s collected (generally speaking) one way or another. Unfortunately right now it’s collected from the lower and middle classes, but no matter what you do drugs, treatments, doctors, hospitals, etc. cost money. It’s never, ever, ever “free”. If a drug costs $2,000/month there are probably some inefficiencies baked into the price, but even if it were $500/month, that $500 has to come from somewhere.
    - ericd 6y ago
      Probably some inefficiencies baked into the price? There are massive inefficiencies at every level. I probably wouldn't share this "it's the way it is because it has to be" reasoning if you've never looked into why US healthcare is as expensive as it is. For a decent overview: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/why-does-health-care-cost-so-m https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/why-does-health-care-co... "Just to give you one example, Duke University Hospital has 900 hospital beds and 1,300 billing clerks."
bqe 6y ago
> They pay for expensive ($$$$$$) cloud anti-bot/anti-scraping, captcha you after a few requests if you run adblock, they pay for extensive browser/device (attempting to reidentify a user across multiple devices/multiple browsers) fingerprinting services and Fastly. This sounds like a great anti-account takeover program. I imagine with all of the various compliance programs they have to deal with and the legal risk, these are prudent measures.
- ev1 6y ago
  There is no registration or login.
pkaye 6y ago
GoodRx doesn't pay for the medicines. They just offer the copay discount cards already available from manufacturers. The manufacturers have a fake prices they use as a negotiating point with insurance companies to maximize their profit.

dmix 6y ago

Just like school tuition. The more gov subsidized debt that can't be bankrupted the more admins they keep hiring and the bigger the cost/shit rolls down hill. Combine that with a culture that overvalues all university diplomas as equal, while disregarding the economic opportunities of at least half of them are almost nil, and you have a great recipe for massive failure for a big percentage of the young population. The half baked social programs always do this. Same with how rent control in NYC and Toronto in the 1970s ended up significantly reducing the supply of low-income housing because it stopped incentivizing developers from building cheap houses in cities that had it (they just went elsewhere) while also ghettoizing a bunch of neighbourhoods because there was zero incentive to maintain buildings (which led to mass arsons in places like harlem). If you're going to socialize it either go all the way and nationalize it/fully fund it or find a way that doesn't fuck the citizens over (like these glorified schemes to hand money over to politicially-connected middlemen like big pharma and diploma mills). OR in most cases just let the market do it's job. Like letting generic drug makers take over markets way sooner, without the multitude of government protection rackets that protect big pharma (including FDAs giant backlog). Meanwhile (social) media blames capitalism for every expensive drug or tuition price... like it actually makes sense for ANY market to charge a working class person $1000/pill. These flaws seem so obvious to me but are repeated in so many western countries, not just the US. While blame goes in so many randomly misguided directions. Often heavily greased by the people who benefit from these schemes.