4 ms·
Drug costs are contentious because they're easily visible and often no covered by insurance. The other costs are obfuscated in complex billing and hidden under
by dboreham 1y ago
Drug costs are contentious because they're easily visible and often no covered by insurance. The other costs are obfuscated in complex billing and hidden under principle/agent veils.
E.g. my son has a peanut allergy and so we need to buy EpiPens. They were hundreds of dollars, and the vendor played MBA-nonsense games like requiring two to be purchased at a time. Meanwhile I was able to drive to Canada and buy the exact same thing (and as many or as few as I needed) for tens of dollars.
- tptacek 1y agoWe know where all the health spending in the system ends up, and while Pharma pricing is quite high and those companies are quite profitable, most of our health spending doesn't go to either Pharma or insurers.
- megaman821 1y agoThat is annoying, but not a huge cost driver. If you son ended up in the ER it would cost multiple lifetimes of epipens (even at an inflated price).
- pixl97 1y agoI mean, this is a bit of circular logic isn't it... "Medicine being expensive doesn't impact care being expensive" Which is almost exactly the opposite. If people could get cheap general doctor visits and be able to afford their medicines then this would reduce the number of emergency visits allowing less beds/doctors/hospitals.
- cyberax 1y agoSimilar story. I suffer from dry eyes, and I like perfluorohexyloctane eye drops. They require a prescription and cost $800 here in the US. I am now ordering them from an Irish pharmacy. They are over the counter there, and cost $20. They are literally exactly the same, you can tell by the lot numbers on the bottles.
- botro 1y agoI've suffered from dry eyes for many years and have tried all the over the counter options available in the US with no success, especially for overnight dryness. Could you please share a hint for the Irish pharmacy delivering to the US?
- cyberax 1y agoSearch for "EvoTears" or "NovoTears", it's the European brand for it. I've been using this pharmacy: https://www.opticalrooms.ie/product/evotears/ https://www.opticalrooms.ie/product/evotears/ There are others that apparently can ship to the US.
- FireBeyond 1y ago> and the vendor played MBA-nonsense games like requiring two to be purchased at a time Washington State, the vendors lobbied on the back of a tragic incident to require a variety of people and places to have EpiPens physically present at all times... ... including in the back of ambulances, when we (I am, or was, a paramedic) we had epinephrine already available. Which resulted in a huge amount of waste, throwing out expired EpiPens, etc. The number of hoops we had to jump through with the DOH to eventually allow us to have a specific "epi jump kit" (a small tackle box with syringes and a vial, alcohol, etc.) was enormous, but the net result was a replacement cost of $28 for the kit (actually less, because the $28 included the tackle box) versus the $600+ for EpiPens.