5 ms·
Note: this is less than one half of one percent of total Medicare spending.
by selectodude 4y ago
Note: this is less than one half of one percent of total Medicare spending.
- csours 4y agoA billion here, a billion there, soon you're talking real money
- Clubber 4y ago3.6b ($) / 258m (adults) = $14 in taxes per adult in the US, per year.
- labster 4y agoOr $1.4 M each to America’s Job Creators (tm) Edit: Wait, these are payroll taxes. There’s no real benefit to the rich because the taxes are capped. Which is why it’s not worth it to do anything about it, as no plutocrats will get significantly more than the masses.
- ta988 4y agoJust that single problem is around ten basis point of average tax. All these problems compound because to find the hundreds of millions to close a fiscal exercise, things will get cut and never repaired after. So any fiscal inefficiency causes much more damage than just the direct problem.
- daenz 4y agoDeath by a thousand paper cuts. No one cut is egregious enough to warrant an emergency, yet you still die.
- paulpauper 4y agoexcept this is a solution that is often touted to cut spending a lot, and second, it's not like finding new solutions becomes easier as earlier solutions are exhausted. Finding one solution is easy, finding dozens...not so much.
- ekianjo 4y agoNope, by default you should apply the 80/20 rule and tackle the big 20% of the costs that cause 80% of spending. Anything else is just pocket money.
- digitaltrees 4y agoI was coming here to say exactly that. Thank you. It’s important to point out how vast this spending is so that headlines that give dollar figures are balanced and the hyperbolic rhetoric can be put in context. I would point out that it may end up costing more to source and administer generic drugs than $3.6B and could end up harming the pharmaceutical research economy.
- BurningFrog 4y agoBut the study is only for a small subset of that spending. For that subset the computed saving is $9.6b -> $6.0b.
- mgkimsal 4y agoassuming that held true across the board, that's a ~35% reduction. What if it was only half that? Round down, and say generic policy might 'only' save 15%. 15% of 10s of billions of dollars (hundreds? can't find full numbers right now) is significant.
- refurb 4y agoNot only that but new generic drugs are often more expensive (the first generic manufacturer get 6 month exclusivity to encourage generics). After that more companies enter the market and prices drop. When Lipitor went generic, the first one was ~30% discount. Now it’s a 95% discount. If this study just took average spending in the past then compared it to prices today that’s apples and oranges.