U.S. Congress members demand investigation of $100 price hike of lifesaving EpiPens
84 replies, posted
The government has a responsibility to protect its people. That should include healthcare. The government's involvement in healthcare is on the wrong side of the aisle. Taxes should pay for it, and the US has more than enough GDP to pay for that shit, and even if they don't, then they should regulate it so the cost of this shit isn't more than a small percentage than it cost to make and transport. It costs 44 cents to make a bag of IV fluid, so why the fuck do I have to pay $450 for it? Does Jesus piss in it?
The argument is Oh well insurance argues the cost down since they pay it. If you're lucky they pay it. They hire detectives that scrutinize claims to find ways not to. A lot of them deny your claim the first time you file it because SOME people won't dispute and fight them on it. It's all a big money making scam based on our health, the one thing people will pay any amount for, and they know it
[QUOTE=space1;50938354]Insincere and superficial remarks aside, who's seriously going to pay for it?
[URL]http://interactive.taxfoundation.org/business-in-america/#The-US-Has-the-Least-Competitive-Corporate-Tax-Rate-in-the-OECD[/URL][/QUOTE]
If only we had a hyperinflated military budget we could reduce and relocate money from that.
[QUOTE=Sableye;50937923]also congress should investigate why its [I]only[/I] sold in double packs (or over 1200$ per 'dose' for a consumer)
i don't expect anything to come of this, they were investigating martin skreisi for over inflating the price of life saving drugs before and they haven't done shit. Republicans in congress are too involved in kicking americans off of health coverage than they are on controlling drug prices.[/QUOTE]
The expiration date here is only like a year, which would make that extra shit..
That's the main problem with these things anyway, I don't people often use these things before their expiration date.
[QUOTE=pentium;50937782]One of those rare times when Congress comes together and agrees on something.[/QUOTE]
The ultimate sign that you've fucked up beyond comprehension.
[QUOTE=Anderan;50938839]If only we had a hyperinflated military budget we could reduce and relocate money from that.[/QUOTE]
You could reduce military spending, but you probably can't cut it fast enough to finance universal healthcare. Sure universal healthcare is a great thing but I doubt you'd be able to finance it properly just by reducing military spending, since NATO stipulates that member countries should spend 2% of their GDP on military expenditure. (the US spends 3.3%?)
Besides, Europeans pay a sales tax of ~20%, and companies pay up to 31% of every employee's salary in taxes that finance health care among other things, in addition to taxes on their earnings. And of course Europeans also have a higher income tax.
You can't get something without paying for it, more or less.
Fuck. This unbridled ruining of lives and the fact that it's allowed to go on on such a huge scale, for so long, is the result of so many failures of people and law. Even in a practically corporate-run country corporations can't choose who lives and who dies based on who can afford their aggressive new profit margins. I have so much hate for the individuals who make these decisions.
[QUOTE=Fourier;50938716]No, it's not regulations. It's patents you dorks.[/QUOTE]
Why? The same non-generic EpiPens only cost 47 Euro's per piece here, which is in line with the older American prices. And there are also 2 other brands available for likewise prices.
Policy is important, doctors don't have the authority to prescribe the brand here unless they can argue it clinically relevant.
Which stops the stupid generic version being non-competing because of brand recognition.
[QUOTE=momoiro;50939062]You could reduce military spending, but you probably can't cut it fast enough to finance universal healthcare. Sure universal healthcare is a great thing but I doubt you'd be able to finance it properly just by reducing military spending, since NATO stipulates that member countries should spend 2% of their GDP on military expenditure. (the US spends 3.3%?)
Besides, Europeans pay a sales tax of ~20%, and companies pay up to 31% of every employee's salary in taxes that finance health care among other things, in addition to taxes on their earnings. And of course Europeans also have a higher income tax.
You can't get something without paying for it, more or less.[/QUOTE]
not to derail but the army alone cannot account for 6.5 Trillion in expenses from last year, so i'd say there may be room for the billions needed for actual healthcare reform if we actually held them to some kind of accounting standards
also our insurance system is breaking down because when we expanded coverage less healthy (previously uncovered) people have gotten coverage and now are making the system loose money because theyre actually seeing doctors for the first time in their lives. free market healthcare does not work because it encourages people not to spend money on healthcare so healthcare insurance companies can rake in a boatload
[QUOTE=zombini;50937942]They need to fix this shit right NOW. This whole fucked up mess of a pharmaceutical system. A few months ago my mom went to pick up her monthly script for IBS meds and the price jumped from $90-100 per bottle to $1200 per month/bottle within a month. There's no fucking way we can afford that, that's more than 30% of our total income for the month. She hasn't been able to eat normally ever since because if she eats more than half a sandwich at one time, she spends the next 4 hours evacuating her internals into the toilet.
It's a lot more than just obscure meds that an asshole hedge fund manager decides to hike the price of, it's most semi-niche meds in general really. There's no logical reason why a box of insulin pens should be $750, insulin is mass produced in big vats via genetically engineered e. coli, which isn't exactly a rare material. Sure research costs should be recovered because they're apeshit expensive to develop, but my god by now shit like insulin and the epipen should've paid for that by now. I honestly think there should be a profit limit over material and manufacturing cost, say 100-200% which is very generous, after R&D costs are recouped. That way you can't charge 700 fucking dollars for a pill that costs 0.005c to make.[/QUOTE]
Mylan didn't even do the R&D for epipens. They bought the rights from Merck. [URL="http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/13/business/generic-drug-maker-agrees-to-settlement-in-price-fixing-case.html"]They've also been fined in the past by the FTC for price hikes[/URL].
[QUOTE=1legmidget;50939325]Mylan didn't even do the R&D for epipens. They bought the rights from Merck. [URL="http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/13/business/generic-drug-maker-agrees-to-settlement-in-price-fixing-case.html"]They've also been fined in the past by the FTC for price hikes[/URL].[/QUOTE]
ah the good ol' Valeant style of "R&D", we all know how sustainable that is!
[QUOTE=ilikecorn;50939350]The general idea is that the company who offers the "generic" drug, offers it at a significantly lower cost since they DID no R&D. The problem is, simply put, no one actually enforces that. It'd be nice if the FDA and FTC did; maybe we'd start to see lower drug prices.[/QUOTE]
The problem is this isn't even a generic version. Whoever buys the rights to a drug owns the patents and thus has marketing exclusivity. They can charge whatever the hell they want, usually extortionate amounts as seen here. It's the same tune sung by the likes of Martin Shkreli and Michael Pearson.
Imagine if you cut the military budget in half and spent that on healthcare or education.
[QUOTE=sltungle;50938129]And the context of this response is the exact issue. You can't see past the idea of the market. Americans have it so deeply ingrained into them that it's unamerican and unpatriotic to not let the market make its way into absolutely every possible avenue of money making - that it's a kick in the balls to the American dream to not let people capitalise on everything - that you reject the concept of allowing the government to be the ones to control drug supplies and instead put it to the market itself.
[I]Anything[/I] healthcare related should ultimately have a publicly controlled and publicly funded option that's paid for through taxation, and it should be, as best as possible, calibrated to exactly break even in terms of expenditure. The continued wellbeing or survival of people shouldn't be dictated almost exclusively by people who make money out of the deal; people are required for the society to function, so the society has a responsibility to keep the people healthy for it to function properly.[/QUOTE]
This response is a total non sequitur. Someone claimed was a result of unrestricted capitalism, I clarified hoe ridiculous of a statement that was, and you respond with an emotive moral response about how it ought to be provided by the government.
What ought to be done is a totally different question than whether this is an example of unrestrained capitalism at work.
[QUOTE=sgman91;50939378]This response is a total non sequitur. Someone claimed was a result of unrestricted capitalism, I clarified hoe ridiculous of a statement that was, and you respond with an emotive moral response about how it ought to be provided by the government.
What ought to be done is a totally different question than whether this is an example of unrestrained capitalism at work.[/QUOTE]
I think the issue is that you've misunderstood my first post in your original response to it. I assumed it would clear from my contention of nobody should "make a buck off of your continued wellbeing, or in some cases survival," that the idea of [I]not[/I] having a publically funded health care is retarded. If you let somebody charge you directly for medicine they're going to be able to jack the prices up because you can't exactly go without.
[QUOTE=Fourier;50938716]No, it's not regulations. It's patents you dorks.[/QUOTE]
It's actually both, and in this case it's more regulations than patents. It's incredibly difficult to get an EpiPen like competitor to market because you have to jump the myriad of hurdles of regulation first. Multiple companies have tried and failed to do so.
[editline]24th August 2016[/editline]
[QUOTE=sltungle;50939406]I think the issue is that you've misunderstood my first post in your original response to it. I assumed it would clear from my contention of nobody should "make a buck off of your continued wellbeing, or in some cases survival," that the idea of [I]not[/I] having a publically funded health care is retarded. If you let somebody charge you directly for medicine they're going to be able to jack the prices up because you can't exactly go without.[/QUOTE]
You said that this is what happens when you let companies rein free. That is a completely false claim. These high prices have everything to do with the lack of a true free market and nothing to do with companies given free rein to do whatever they want.
You may think that the incredibly high levels of regulations are necessary, but at least recognize that they are the cause of these high prices.
[QUOTE=momoiro;50939062]You could reduce military spending, but you probably can't cut it fast enough to finance universal healthcare. Sure universal healthcare is a great thing but I doubt you'd be able to finance it properly just by reducing military spending, since NATO stipulates that member countries should spend 2% of their GDP on military expenditure. (the US spends 3.3%?)[/QUOTE]
Who gives a fuck? 5 NATO countries, US included, met the 2% guideline in 2015. Those that missed it include Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Turkey, the Czech Republic, and Romania. 9 of the top 10 NATO economies (in 2014 by GDP) in Europe.
The US has it's own problems to worry about, if Europe doesn't care enough to defend itself (as a whole), despite effectively having a comparable economic strength to the US and far far more economic strength than Russia, that's their problem. The bigger problem is the US is the only viable counterweight to Russia and China in the Pacific.
[QUOTE=DeEz;50939371]Imagine if you cut the military budget in half and spent that on healthcare or education.[/QUOTE]
But we need that money for killing brown people
[QUOTE=ilikecorn;50939395]
I'd be down. We'll close all of our overseas bases, and tell everyone "fuck you you're on your own". Then maybe we could take care of our own social issues instead of WORLD POLICE issues.[/QUOTE]
May not be on topic but w/e:
We could easily afford to close all of our bases outside of the Visegrad Group, discontinue arms sales to non NATO countries, and retire all troops stationed in western Europe.
Bishbashbosh that's a huge amount of dosh waiting for us
[QUOTE=Zillamaster55;50939612]May not be on topic but w/e:
We could easily afford to close all of our bases outside of the Visegrad Group, discontinue arms sales to non NATO countries, and retire all troops stationed in western Europe.
Bishbashbosh that's a huge amount of dosh waiting for us[/QUOTE]
and a ton of military personnel out of work!
Not to mention defense contractors and other companies laying off god knows how many workers when they suddenly have fewer contracts with the US Government.
[QUOTE=sb27;50937790]I guess there aren't any competing, generic medicines? You need competition in the market to ensure that this kind of thing can't happen.[/QUOTE]
Life saving medicine like this, used by so much people, went from 60 to over 300 dollars, shouldn't have its price binded by the company that produces it, be there competitors or not.
This is medicine. A huge necessity for people. Not a graphics card, or something seen as more of a commodity or just not as important.
What I mean is.... It sucks that Nvidya or Intel had almost no competition, so they price gouged their stuff. But it isn't nearly as bad or as actual greedingly evil as a pharmaceutical doing it to something so needed as epipens. Its not even a rare medicine, is it? Its not something made on the spot whenever someone shows up with something rare.
Gutting the military budget isn't necessary for the purposes of finding funding for universal healthcare. Universal healthcare costs taxpayers [I]less[/I].
1) Universal healthcare replaces health insurance, which by necessity costs more to the average individual taxpayer than a simple tax program would, as a tax program is not bound by the need to maximize profit.
2) Health insurance is what is primarily responsible for the massively inflated cost of healthcare in the first place, as healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare products companies are forced to operate within a system at which profit-maximization is at the core. For-profit entities charge as much as they can to as many people as they can to maximize their profits, and with health insurance covering the bulk of the costs to most consumers the bell curve is heavily skewed. Removing health insurance and creating a universal, tax-based healthcare system will allow the government to have a more active role in negotiating and regulating the costs of healthcare at every level.
3) With the implementation of a universal healthcare system, and the removal of private health insurance and the disgustingly inflated costs of healthcare, we remove the need for programs such as Medicare, which are unwieldy and absurdly expensive beasts primarily due to the fact that they are forced to operate within the same market inflated by health insurance companies.
The United States government has the [B]highest healthcare costs in the world[/B] compared to GDP, and the taxpayers have the [B]highest consumer costs in the world[/B]. Universal healthcare systems have proven, conclusively, to be less expensive to the government [I]and[/I] to the consumer. Our system is bloated and broken, and that is thanks primarily to the role that health insurance plays in our healthcare system.
So, to answer the question, [i]"how do we afford to pay for universal healthcare?"[/i] I will pose another question: [I]how can we afford [B]not[/B] to?[/I]
Tax-based universal healthcare won't just pay for itself, it will actually result in a huge budgetary surplus compared to our current system.
[QUOTE=sltungle;50939406]I assumed it would clear from my contention of nobody should "make a buck off of your continued wellbeing, or in some cases survival," that the idea of [I]not[/I] having a publically funded health care is retarded.[/QUOTE]
'And the context of this response is the exact issue. You can't see past the idea of government regulation. Australians have it so deeply ingrained into them that it's horrifying to not let the government micromanage basic human needs of their citizens - that it's threatening and dangerous to let people make decisions for themselves in a way consistent with the rest of the economy - that you reject the concept of allowing the people to be the ones to control drug supplies and instead put it to the government itself.'
Do you see how unconvincing and condescending this argument is? I'm all for public healthcare but sgman is pretty much right on the money in saying that it's government regulation of the free market, ie patents, that have led to this situation, and responding to him with essentially 'you poor deluded american' isn't even an argument, it's borderline ad hominem.
BDA's got the right idea. In a properly managed system, the elimination of profit as a motive should reduce costs. The issue, of course, is that governmental programs tend not to be properly managed or anywhere near as efficient as they could be, which is why the private sector tends to deliver products cheaper, more quickly, and more efficiently. But our healthcare system is so sprawlingly dysfunctional that from here it's very hard to imagine the government could do worse.
Maybe if we did divert some of our enormous military budget, we could fix the horror show that is the VA, and then use that model to expand to public healthcare for the whole country.
We're all on the same page that it's the delivery method, EpiPen, that's being hiked and not epinephrine, right.
[QUOTE=Zillamaster55;50939612]May not be on topic but w/e:
We could easily afford to close all of our bases outside of the Visegrad Group, discontinue arms sales to non NATO countries, and retire all troops stationed in western Europe.
Bishbashbosh that's a huge amount of dosh waiting for us[/QUOTE]
I don't think that's as easy or nearly as beneficial as you think it is.
[QUOTE=Sableye;50937923]also congress should investigate why its [I]only[/I] sold in double packs (or over 1200$ per 'dose' for a consumer)
i don't expect anything to come of this, they were investigating martin skreisi for over inflating the price of life saving drugs before and they haven't done shit. Republicans in congress are too involved in kicking americans off of health coverage than they are on controlling drug prices.[/QUOTE]
It's because Congress passed a rule saying they had to.
What I don't get is, this monopoly was state created/assissted and only now are we going "oh shit that was a mistake".
[QUOTE=Big Dumb American;50939777]Gutting the military budget isn't necessary for the purposes of finding funding for universal healthcare. Universal healthcare costs taxpayers [I]less[/I].
1) Universal healthcare replaces health insurance, which by necessity costs more to the average individual taxpayer than a simple tax program would, as a tax program is not bound by the need to maximize profit.
2) Health insurance is what is primarily responsible for the massively inflated cost of healthcare in the first place, as healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare products companies are forced to operate within a system at which profit-maximization is at the core. For-profit entities charge as much as they can to as many people as they can to maximize their profits, and with health insurance covering the bulk of the costs to most consumers the bell curve is heavily skewed. Removing health insurance and creating a universal, tax-based healthcare system will allow the government to have a more active role in negotiating and regulating the costs of healthcare at every level.
3) With the implementation of a universal healthcare system, and the removal of private health insurance and the disgustingly inflated costs of healthcare, we remove the need for programs such as Medicare, which are unwieldy and absurdly expensive beasts primarily due to the fact that they are forced to operate within the same market inflated by health insurance companies.
The United States government has the [B]highest healthcare costs in the world[/B] compared to GDP, and the taxpayers have the [B]highest consumer costs in the world[/B]. Universal healthcare systems have proven, conclusively, to be less expensive to the government [I]and[/I] to the consumer. Our system is bloated and broken, and that is thanks primarily to the role that health insurance plays in our healthcare system.
So, to answer the question, [i]"how do we afford to pay for universal healthcare?"[/i] I will pose another question: [I]how can we afford [B]not[/B] to?[/I]
Tax-based universal healthcare won't just pay for itself, it will actually result in a huge budgetary surplus compared to our current system.[/QUOTE]
Do you really think global corporations will lower the costs of their medications from guaranteed business?
Who will burden the tax hardest, the lower or the upper classes?
[QUOTE=space1;50941386]Do you really think global corporations will lower the costs of their medications from guaranteed business?
Who will burden the tax hardest, the lower or the upper classes?[/QUOTE]
And in a free market system that's more exploitative everythings hunky dory?
Canada's doing fine with socialized medicine, comparably better than the states by the vast majority of metrics so I don't really think your argument is the strongest.
[QUOTE=Trebgarta;50939916]
Even auto injectors require training the [I]adults[/I], why not teach them the kit instead?
[/QUOTE]
"training" you show your doctor you can follow simple instructions.
[QUOTE=ilikecorn;50939395]Yes and no. You can't have marketing exclusivity forever; IIRC you have it for 20 years before it's back to the open market.
It's still fucking bullshit; but in the actual grand scheme of things it would totally work out if people were actively monitoring the system.
[editline]24th August 2016[/editline]
I'd be down. We'll close all of our overseas bases, and tell everyone "fuck you you're on your own". Then maybe we could take care of our own social issues instead of WORLD POLICE issues.[/QUOTE]
Rest of the world freaks out and says "you're abandoning us to Russia!!!" because now they actually have to pay for their own military and can't put all that spending towards education and healthcare.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
[QUOTE=space1;50941386]Do you really think global corporations will lower the costs of their medications from guaranteed business?
Who will burden the tax hardest, the lower or the upper classes?[/QUOTE]
Well preferably the taxation would be progressive, as it is in every country with universal healthcare, so that the lower classes aren't fucking bankrupt at the end of the month, and the upper classes are picking up the slack with their naturally higher tax rate. Works fine everywhere else (well until the Tories start to withhold money to make the NHS look like its a failing institution, but that's a different problem entirely).
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