Of all of the many poor domestic tax decisions that came out of the Bush Administration, the massive corporate giveaway that is Medicaid Part D was one of the most offensive.
A new study has found that this is a very expensive mistake. Its title: “Medicare Part D pays needlessly high brand-name drug prices compared with other OECD countries and with U.S. government programs.”
click for full PDF
U.S. Could Save up to $16B if Medicare Part D Prices are Negotiated (WSJ)
Obama administration seeks to negotiate Medicare drug prices (Reuters)
It’s so funny to hear the snide commentary from Right Wingers on Business TV saying Hillary tanked the market in response to Martin Shkreli unquestionably egregious behavior. I guess Republicans like the drug companies to Americans so we subsidize the rest of the world.
Why are you so worried about a few million immigrants GOP Genuflectors when you subsidize seven billion drug users?
No wonder Medicare is going broke. Obviously they should be negotiating drug prices to save $16 billion a year. One wonders how much low lying fruit savings like this Medicare could make.
Let me give you another example. There are over 100,000 dialysis patients waiting for a kidney transplant. Dialysis is expensive and Medicare saves substantial amounts when a transplant occurs. But Medicare and the rest of government does nothing to encourage live kidney donations. There were only 2,000 unrelated live donations in 2014. Medicare could pay donors a fee and save substantial amounts.
How many other examples like this are in the Medicare program?
Harvest the poor for their organs? I doubt if anyone rich will sell their kidneys.
Yes, the donors would probably be poorer people that could use a $40,000 payment. Just like the poor people that enlist to fight our wars. While we “protect” the poor, 700,000 Americans, many of them poor, suffer from End Stage Kidney Disease. 100,000 of them have passed the rigorous tests to get on the waiting list and wait for years for a cadaver kidney. Do they deserve any consideration?
Why not let USians seek health care in much lower cost locales like the British, Dutch and French health are systems do? In addition, the US could get us out of its hair… Then we could live in Oz, NL, FR, South America Sri Lanka… or some other place that values older people…
The cost and consequences of people cutting pills in half or abstaining from taking their hypertension and diabetes medications, are huge. Those costs could easily top the $11 billion/year in direct cost from failing to negotiate prices. We are far overdue a system of open reimportation. The idea that it would be dangerous, is absurd. You can simply put the reimportation businesses under the same quality control scheme that locally produced and distributed drugs undergo. Random test of what is in the medicine is not that hard. And then we need to crack down on exclusivity contracts for importation of drugs; it is illegal collusion and the gangsters like Shkreli who do it, should be thrown in jail (and the people and states suffering from this kind of collusion should be reimbursed the cost).
One of the main reasons that prescriptions are cheaper in Canada (often for the same pills manufactured in the US and exported to Canada) is that their government negotiates prices for the medications. The much more “advanced” US pays what ever for the same pills, whatever the companies say is the correct price. No surprise the pills cost a great deal more in the US. When Medicare Part D passed and it outlawed the government from negotiating pill prices my take was that it is a license to steal. It has turned out to be just the case.
Stupidest thing possible, oh wait there must be WMDs in Iraq somewhere. Maybe that was the stupidest thing. There are several choices here.