I’d love to make more money.
It’s paying more money to AT&T, Comcast, drug companies and my Doctor who sticks me with what my insurance company says is too large a charge that I object to.
No, but if you can show somehow that in the second week, it was government intervention that kept the price from rising as quickly, and otherwise it would have gone to $3, then you claim that.
Capitalism is overrated, I want government control over businesses
Care to provide one cite of someone in government claiming that ACA as it was proposed and the enacted would stop cost increases?
Maybe a single payer system with strict controls on prices could decrease costs - but that isn’t what we have, not even close. And that is a maybe.
Thank you for making my point.
If, absent some intervention, prices would have been $3.00 next week, then yes, gas prices went down from what they would otherwise have been.
In the case of health care, prices were rising at a pretty good clip in the early years of this century, and then the rate went down. For example, in 2013 the Wall Street Journal noted that medical cost inflation wasat the lowest rate in half a century.
This argument is complete garbage. The epipen design is 40ish years old. The Epinepherine chemical itself has been isolated for over a hundred years. Patent law has absolutely nothing to do with why a device which costs $0.15 to manufacture sells for a twenty five thousand percent markup.
Then why isn’t someone selling it for twenty five bucks?
Patents.
Edit to add: and lobbyists controlling the regulators
Worse! The numbers are worse than that! The fifteen cent pen is being sold for $300.00 – which is a 200,000% markup!
ETA: That’s if the actual production cost really is fifteen cents. Personally, I’ll bet it’s more than that.
More people having insurance under ACA is not a good thing. It’s called the “Affordable Care Act”, not the “Create A Captive Market For Insurance Salesmen Act.” You only succeeded in increasing insurance policy numbers because you punished people for not buying the overpriced shit they were peddling.
Why is it not good for more people to have insurance?
People have health problems whether or not they have insurance, and SOMEBODY has to pay for those problems (either directly or indirectly, including lost productivity, survivor benefits paid out on preventable deaths, etc.).
Yeah, probably five bucks.
The program that the manufacturer gives me to get my simponi for five dollars after insurance instead of $100.00, is that tax deductible for them?
Does more Medicaid ring a bell? That is where most of the increase comes from.
You want to bring down drug prices in the US? Easy, just make it legal to do parallel importing from anywhere in the world of meds if they’re the same brand / company as an existing approved meds available in the US. Instantly your prices for all prescription meds would drop, because the Pharma companies are screwing you hard in the US on pricing. Thats actually not against capitalism, thats FOR capitalism. The only reason companies can get away with the prices they do in the US is because of the regulations that prevent this kind of parallel importing. This is a case where the market would actually sort it out except for the artificial monopoly created by government regulations.
The drug companies will whine and scream about safety but in many cases its the same drug made in the same lab, but charged 4 times more (or higher) in the US than in other countries.
Your child is at risk for anaphylaxis, and a properly functioning injector is the only thing standing between life and death. Do you choose the foolproof been around for decades market leading expensive product, or the new to the market cheap version?
Thing is, they ARE selling it for twenty five bucks (or more like forty) in other countries, just not this country. Rather than find some ridiculous end around for this problem, or wait for a non-existent market solution, maybe our lawmakers can look at what’s different between those countries and our country, like what law they have that we don’t have. Then do that.
The US does have higher safety standard that many countries, but thats irrelevant because often the exact same product from the same manufacturer is available cheaper overseas. The reason is because they can. In the US they know it’s most likely covered by insurance, while in other countries they have to price them cheaper to sell because people have less money in countries like Brazil and India, or the government has negotiated a bulk rate for that drug in some countries, eg Australia does this.
Like I said allow parallel importing and the problem goes away, prices in the US would fall to the same levels elsewhere, it would be impossible to do different pricing in each country. Unlike anti-vaxx nutjobs ungrounded fears, this is genuinely something you can blame “big pharma” for, as they have lobbyists and 100s of millions of donations that they’d use to try and fight any attempt to allow parallel importing.
Also, many EU countries have laws that regulate the price for pharmaceuticals. But, as with anything, there appears to be a trade-off between having medicine that is affordable versus encouraging research and development by letting the pharma companies set high prices to ensure profitability.
Personally I’d rather have the government subsidise pure research and then when they hit gold they license it to private enterprise to manufacture with a license fee to go back to more pure research. Basic research on new drugs should not be something that’s purely privately funded and then subject to the worst of capitalism, eg government sanctioned monopolies.
They pay less because we essentially subsidize their costs by allowing the drug companies to recoup their R&D costs here.