Why a patient paid a $285 copay for a $40 drug

Interesting perspective.

The company is responsible to shareholders, and the price of a good will be as high as what the market can bear.
Free market.

If price is high, and the market is profitable, someone would try to go there. Oh wait. is there a generic? If not, too bad.

So did we just establish healthcare cannot be a completely free market without regulations?

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What’s a reasonable regulation, though? One that’ll still be capitalist, but also would take into account country’s/worlds citizens?

World’s citizens is not our concern. To hell with them.

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Other countries are trickier, especially if there’s little IP law, like in china, or maybe even in india?.
Also their purchase power is low.
Then wht?

Lower development costs in exchange for shorter patents. Look at how other countries like Europe and Japan do it. We are not the only developed country but our system is singularly the absolute worst.

How can you lower development costs? You mean regulatory costs? What’s that as a percentage of the total cost?

I have no doubt about our system being one of the worst ones.

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There were some reforms at the FDA to make trials cheaper. Firms can also choose to target patients with certain markers. So their drugs could not be used on other patients but dev time and costs much lower.

'Merica for you!

The couple moved there full-time in 2011 when Leon Lederman started experiencing memory loss problems that became more severe, his wife said. His Nobel Prize sold for $765,000 in an auction in 2015 to help pay for medical bills and care.

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he could probably apply for citizenship in canada… sad truth.

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Lol, my pharmacist friend should get a kick out of this:

Seems like the only harm was failing to notice the lack of a watermark on 11 of those 700,000 prescriptions. Something a licensed pharmacist could well have missed. Maybe the licensing process for people who do this kind of work is too strict and only drives up cost.

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There is a lot of useless licensing. I did not know painting someone else’s nails needs to take a long test and gets a license until a relative of mine got one. Bullshit licensing like that makes changing careers difficult for people.

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It used to be they had to know all the drug interactions and be careful of of what people were taking. Now a computer evaluates all of that. Now we even have machines to count the pills and put them in the bottle. I think the job will get automated to the point we need far fewer of them.

It takes more hours of training to cut hair than be an EMT. Some states require more hours for cosmetology than paramedics.

No doubt the pharmacists’ salary is one of the million reasons why our healthcare cost is so darn high.

Do people need a license to administer xrays say in a dentist office? Even though it’s literally just pushing a button?

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Dog walker needs a license in SF. Training requirements:

Training is required for some commercial dog walkers in order to obtain a permit. If either of the following situations is true, you must complete 20 hours of classroom training or an apprenticeship program of at least 40 hours of practical experience at one of the SF Animal Care & Control approved schools listed.

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They are getting better about some things. Now each office doesn’t have a radiologist on staff working a small percent of the time. They send x-rays out to a radiologist who reads them and sends back their findings. It’s just as quick as having a radiologist in the office. We need about 10x more of that type of innovation in healthcare.

Urgent care is far cheaper than the ER and can handle most of the use cases for ER visits.

Told my friend a long time ago that the pharmacist profession is dying unless you are in R&D but she is still living in her bubble. You don’t even need a high school diploma to count pills.

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