It just means some other poor sucker has to pay more. Not that it’s her fault, it’s just the fucked up health care system.
That’s the goal. The insurance company wants your premiums while keeping the out of pocket so high you find another way to pay, so they don’t have to cough up a dime.
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Somewhere in heaven there is a Soviet animator smiling to themselves and thinking, “they finally get it!” Every time this image is used
We got a shitty version of Republican healthcare reform, and Republicans and moderates refuse to admit we need anything more.
Republicans want to tear it down
And “moderates” say asking for more is somehow worse than being a Republican.
Shits not getting better till will finally get neoliberal.politicians out of the Dem party and back where they came from: the Republican party.
I don’t know why people act like they don’t understand opening the “left party” up to “fiscally conservative moderates” just concentrates all the crazy in the Republican party and depresses turnout from the right.
If you’re trying to stop facism, we’re taking the wrong path.
If you’re trying to make sure the wealthy always win tho, yeah, this makes sense. But the fascists are going to keep winning half the time.
When they could be winning 0% of the time if we just gave Dem voters candidates they want. Because any “moderate” voters that go R, are statistically insignificant.
They’re just loud and insist they’re always right. Theyre Karen’s.
And we need to go back to just ignoring them.
God you have to stop writing one sentence per paragraph.
Shit is so unreadable.
All it does is take up space.
What in the sam hell are you trying to communicate with this word salad?
But if you want to talk politics and healthcare, there’s one party that’s made any real effort at improvement in the last 2 decades, and it’s the Democrats. The Republicans try to gut the system at every opportunity.
There are plenty of Democrats in Congress that would like to continue to improve healthcare, but the Dems don’t have the numbers - particularly in the House - to pass further reform.
There are plenty of Democrats in Congress that would like to continue to improve healthcare, but the Dems don’t have the numbers - particularly in the House - to pass further reform.
So you’re saying therenis both “plenty” but also “not enough”?
That doesn’t make logical sense to me…
I’m saying not everyone Dem in office really wants to fix healthcare, as evident as there seems to always be just enough against progress to stop progress.
And that logically it’s a safe assumption there’s even more that would oppose progress if they had to, they just don’t want to publicly oppose it unless they’re forced to.
So we basically have two choices.
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Be reactive and keep assuming every Dem supports the party platform until they personally pull a Joe Manchin
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Be proactive and make sure the people on our team our really on our team before we have to rely on them. So that when we have the House, Senate, and presidency we can accomplish stuff.
But if you want to talk politics and healthcare, there’s one party that’s made any real effort at improvement in the last 2 decades, and it’s the Democrats.
And they got a more conservative version of Mitt Romney’s plan passed…
And have spent over a decade opposi g we improve it up to at least where the Republican presidential candidate was 16 years ago…
That’s not enough dawg
Voters want more, they deserve more. So why not give voters a candidate that agrees so that we can easily prevent fascists from getting elected?
I don’t see any downsides to the Dem party running Dem politicians that agree with Dem voters.
I agree with all you’re saying. Obama’s Romneycare was also a huge gift to the insurance companies.
Yeah, we didn’t get healthcare, we got a penalty for not being able to afford insurance…
I get people being excited for any progress back then, I was too.
But it’s 16 years later and now we want from both parties presenting plans to improving it, to one party trying to burn it down and one insisting asking for progress is worse than burning it down…
People just treat it like a team sport now. If you’re not praising their pick, it means you picked the other team.
Meanwhile I’m just out here advocating for the fundamentals.
Like, what did happen to the picks and roll?
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Why do they not want other people to have their basic needs met?
I guess because it’s not profitable?
It makes labor more expensive because people will be less desperate for wages.
The more desperate someone is, the less they’re able to plan ahead and evaluate options.
They’re focused on the short term and only plan to avoid short term negatives.
The people who get irrationally upset when you ask for more out of the Dem party are great examples of that. They’re so stressed and afraid that everything becomes a binary choice of two options that can’t be I fluenced in any way
It’s basic psychology and why Republicans went from Nixon resigning because he knew voters wouldn’t tolerate his illegal actions to modern day trumpets.
The same thing will happen to the Dem party if we walk down the same path as the Republican party.
And thats what the rich want.
Its why WB bought CNN, their board members flat out said it.
Refusing to vote (or making a worthless vote) isn’t the way forward.
Ideally the Republicans are relegated to the trash bin and the Dem party splits into two, the Squad/Bernie party and the Clinton/Pelosi party.
Make it make sense.
The price was bullshit to begin with. The cream probably sells over the counter for about $2.50 in most other countries, so OP still ended up paying 10x the price.
Yeah, it makes sense if you think of it like Skyrim Horse Armour except with life saving drugs. They’ll take as much money from you as they think they can get away with.
Yup. This price is at least partially distorted by the fact that she can’t just go buy the cream without getting a prescription first. That means tight control over distribution, meaning huge barriers to entry and being forced to play ball with this insurance system when someone does enter.
There’s no way for the market to create that simple channel from this medicine to those who need it at the natural market price which is quite low.
All these elements that aren’t naturally required, but are required by law to be part of the deal, cause the price to get weird.
Sort of like hospital bills now. My wife went to the E.R. 2 months ago. They billed the insurance $4K. The insurance said nope and paid $220. We paid $40.
Its a tax scheme.
The pharmacy claims this medication is worth $275, insurance covers $40, and then they get as much as they can out of the patient while claiming the rest as a loss they can write off on their taxes.
US healthcare is stupid.
It’s not the pharmacies that set the prices. At least, not really. The pharmacy pays near the listed “cash-price” for the drug from the wholesaler, who buys from the manufacturer, so the pharmacy can’t really afford to charge much less than they do for many drugs.
And the price the patient sees after insurance is decided based on the insurance or pharmacy benefit manager who deals with prescription benefits for the insurance.
Pharmacies are also contractually prevented from charging less to a cash-paying patient than what they charge to the insurance companies, so you start getting weirdness with coupon cards to work around that.
That just sounds like fraud with extra steps.
It looks like the pharmacies do not get the tax write offs, if any. It’s the drug manufacturers who get to double dip by charging insurers for whatever they’re willing to cover, and then write off the rest causing tax payers to foot the bill.
Regardless, I agree with the article that there needs to be legislation that both bans these type of “shell game” programs, and capping the price of medications. And for what it’s worth, I don’t care if that means companies don’t make as much money. They’ll still make money, and the drugs do not actually cost that much to make.
It’s also a scheme for the pharmacies to get as much as they can from the insurance companies.
You should really be replacing
stupidwith “evil”That’s fucking evil and the cunts should be held accountable for their evil
But yous won’t cos you’re pussies
I’d say US healthcare is toxic, and behaves despicably toward those in its care. It’s also inefficient and often counterproductive.
All of this is a result of stupidity and evil, coming both from outside the industry, as well as perpetually generated by the already-ill structure of the industry.
It warps the minds of those who join it, as customers, providers, and regulators. We’re all like software devs loyal to the terrible architecture of a bad codebase due to having to adapt to it to get anything done.
Fucked up systems fuck people up.
Nope. It’s consequential. They need to raise their shareholder value in any way that’s legal, even if it’s not morally right. If they won’t do that, they’d get into trouble. For corporations tax loopholes are there to be exploited.
Making those loopholes illegal is what will fix this. Then you can call it good craftsmanship by politicians. Right now you can barley call it shoddy.
You misspelled tax ‘scam’…
That’s not how tax write off losses work.
Recently had to buy Paxlovid. Pharmacy: “it is expensive and your insurance doesn’t cover it. Will be $1500.” Me: “I don’t know.” Pharmacy: “Wait. If you go to the Pfizer website you can get a coupon.” Me: “ok” (Looks up website and gets coupon on my phone. Paxcess Patient Support Program.) Pharmacy: “let me check now. Oh, free!”
Please make it all make sense.
Your lucky your pharmacy tech recommended the manufacturer coupon. My wife was the only one at her pharmacy that did that
Are the other people she works with actually evil or what? I can’t imagine not begging everyone who came in with a Paxlovid prescription to do that.
Likely one of those things where if you use it too much you lose it.
I had the exact same experience.
Meanwhile over in Europe - went to the doctor in spring as a cough didn’t go away for ages. As suspected nothing he could do much - irritated throat, and just at the time when cold season was giving way for allergy season. So he prescribed some nose spray - and asked if he should also add some antihistamine to the prescription to save me a few eur (didn’t check, but it probably is single digits. That stuff is cheap)
Shit when I have coughs that go too long I just keep coughing.
As a hospice worker, please don’t let stuff like that go unaddressed if at all possible.
Oh trust me the doctors don’t care. Went to the doctor twice already and got sent off after marking me down for general anxiety and possible sleep apnea.
Yeah I have terrible allergies and went to a new doctor, he couldn’t do much but I mentioned I use an over the counter nasal spray for $40. He’s like oh, let me write you a prescription and now I get a prescription one for free in Canada. Too bad my allergy pills aren’t covered though but those are still an affordable price at least.
South Park, very relevant and funny to a scary point…
It’s crazy how we call health insurance, insurance. All it does is slightly discount the bill. It doesn’t insure anything.
But it does. If you get cancer, they pay everything after you hit your max out of pocket. So instead of paying $1M or whatever, you pay something like $15k.
Insurance is there to protect you from black swan-type financial ruin, it isn’t intended to reduce costs for routine care.
The real problem is that costs vary depending on how you pay. The Rx should always cost $X and theb insurance shouldn’t care or know which Rx you pick, they should just pay $Y. The problem imo isn’t insurance, but the completely opaque medical pricing system we have.
If pricing is consistent, it’s a lot easier to design assistance programs for those who need it.
Meanwhile former soviet republics: “Insurance for not going over 15k$? It’s not bill insurance. You get healthcare, state gets paying.”
But that’s not insurance, that’s universal healthcare, which is a completely separate thing.
Here it’s called(translated) Mandatory Medical Insurance.
They can call it whatever they like. Government programs rarely reflect their actual structure.
That said, I don’t know much about European healthcare systems, so maybe it is a form of insurance, idk.
Government programs rarely reflect their actual structure.
I know how it works in Russia. For citizens no matter how much you pay you get free healthcare. But, depending on region, it ranges from just therapist, ambulance and few hospitals few hours away somewhere in the middle of Siberia to polyclinic full of specialists and a lot of specialized hospitals in one city in Moscow.
But if you need “Emergency, including emergency specialized, medical care” because of “sickness, accident, trauma, poisining and other cases requireing emergency treatment”, “Such medical treatment is provided by state and municipal healthcare organizations and is free of charge”. Even if you are tourist.
So there is universal part(emergency healthcare) and “insurance” part(peventative healthcare, non-emergency like optometry). “Insurance” is called mandatory because it is basically 5% tax.
Also, it seems in USSA even citizens pay crazy sums for ambulance. While here it is theoretically possible to get fine for falsly calling ambulance, you have to do phonepranking to actually be fined.
I think it’s very similar in rest of ex-sisters.
Yeah, the ambulance thing is super dumb. I wish we had universal emergency healthcare, it would at least remove that point of stress. You really shouldn’t have to pay if paramedics decide you need to go to the hospital.
But I’m not really sold on the rest. The main issue I have is that what insurance you can get is determined by your employer, and if you don’t like it, you lose whatever they would’ve contributed. If people could pick their own insurance, people would probably be happier, and things like a public option become more useful as a check against private insurance.
I’m not convinced universal healthcare is really going to be cheaper or better for most people though, especially in our already messed up healthcare system. We do need to simplify insurance, because care providers are spending more and more dealing with insurance, which increases costs for everyone without providing value. I’m convinced the ACA (Obamacare) made things worse in that respect, so it simultaneously went too far and not far enough.
But whatever, it could be worse. We pay something like 5%/year for medical care (1.5% for Medicare for the elderly, 3% through my employer plan, and a little extra for incidentals; we’re pretty healthy).
Its a con. Its not called that but in reality with all the convoluted rules and payment streams its simply a con. This is the only country on earth that allows this level of corruption.
Yep. It’s designed to squeeze every dime they can out of people til there’s nothing left when they die. “Oh you can’t afford $600 for meds you need to live? Just for you it’s $300 now!” Then when you come back next month and can’t afford $300 it magically goes down again, and so on until you have nothing left and they let you die. They got all your cash though!
Yeah technically hospitals are supposed to treat you even if they know you can’t pay, but in practice hospitals refuse to deal with a lot of things that you otherwise need to make payments for, often times hospital doctors/nurses will just give you cold medicine and send you home if you go in for a lot of things that really should have something done about them, so if you can’t afford healthcare outside of a hospital (say, a prescription medication you really need) you’re kind of fucked.
In places I know of outside of the US, it’s the norm to go to hospitals for basically anything and people literally use ambulances like they’re fucking taxis because it’s basically free. ((Italians))
The American healthcare system doesn’t usually immediately kill you if you can’t pay, but it definitely kills you gradually if you can’t.
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I’m sorry, maybe I can’t follow as a European, but what do you reference?
I think they’re just demonstrating the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
The US healthcare system isn’t broken. It’s functioning exactly as it’s intended to function: as a way to extract the maximum amount of money from the US public.
I have a medicine that is $1650 with insurance, copay is $60. Or, rung without insurance and the discount card, it’s $0.
Medicine pricing is utterly a scam.
American health insurance is gambling
The involvement of actuaries is a dead giveaway.
All insurance is. So are warranties.
:::The house always wins.:::
Yeah dude I have dry eyes. A 3-month supply of my eye drops is $2700 out of pocket, but there’s this magical card that makes it zero. WTF.
My infusions are 10k. It gets cut by half for insurance. The drug company has like 20k in credits set aside per patient. They pay $10 of my $15 copay with that.
It’s ridiculous.
If you just need to hydrate your eyes, chances are your drops are just salted water
They’re repurposed Borg nanobots in saline solution.
TBH that would absolutely be worth $2700 to me.
It’s actually a pretty clever scheme by drug companies to foist the cost of medicine development AND supplying uninsured people onto insurance companies (and from there, the cost is passed on to people with insurance). I just don’t understand how it’s legal, or why the insurance companies - who are supposed to have such great collective bargaining power - accept this status quo.
I have noticed that it only seems to happen with very expensive, very recently developed drugs which are not yet part of the insurance companies recommended therapies, and they typically require a prior authorization (special approval based on the doctor stating there is a medical necessity for this, and only this, drug).
It’s actually a pretty clever scheme by drug companies to foist the cost of medicine development AND supplying uninsured people onto insurance companies (and from there, the cost is passed on to people with insurance).
Hey now. You forgot that research for 99% of novel drugs discovered this century was funded in at least equal portions by public grants (paid for via taxes). So, the drug companies are really triple-dipping there.
Exactly this. The only annoying part is that it then doesn’t count toward your deductable and out of pocket maximum. It’s crazy how nominally $1k+ medicines become like $30 when you pay without insurance.
Can’t.
I’ve had literally insane run-ins with the US healthcare system, and have a bad enough health issue that I’ve been absolutely ruined by it: physically, mentally, financially, and socially. I do mean utterly – that was not hyperbole.
I have nothing else to add right now, because I have medically-induced PTSD and can’t even think about anything medical without having a panic attack now.
Just wanted to chime in with how bad it can get, and I know my situation isn’t as bad as it can be. It ruined everything for me and destroyed my family, but I never had to care for a dying child. There are no forbidden depths.
The free market works for a lot of stuff. It does not work for healthcare.
There is absolutely nothing free market whatsoever about American healthcare.
It doesn’t work for anything that’s a necessity. If I have no choice but to buy it, I can never put any pressure on the market or shitty corporations.
Inelastic demand. One of many reasons that the stuff you learn in Econ 101 is pure fantasy.
But… I learned about inelastic demand when I took Econ 101. Literally on the page after the introduction of supply and demand, the terminology for the different shapes of the curves are explained. Also before even going into supply and demand they explained the four requirements (which are impossible to exist in the real world) for a free market economy to work to make it clear the supply/demand curve was an incomplete model. Further Economics courses went into more detail about how different scenarios affect that model, and those scenarios are the norm not the exception.
If you mean the things you learn about Econ 101 from libertarians is pure fantasy, then yes, you’re absolutely correct.
Do you understand you sound like someone at a cult claiming that because your robes are a different color that your sect is totally way different than the other sect of the cult that split from your sect because of a disagreement over the color of the robes worshippers should wear?
Economics isn’t a real science (I almost used “hard” instead of “real” but I honestly have infinitely more respect for the soft sciences than I ever will for economics and I don’t want to conflate them), it is an ideology masquerading as a science with lots of math and handwaving to shove reality into shapes that please the people who control the status quo blended together with a potentially lethal dose of cargo cult style beliefs.
If you think there is a crisis of reproducibility and trust in real science…. don’t take a closer look and honestly ask at what people around you generally think of economics “experts” or you aren’t going to like it…
Economics is a science… to understand the past. But to foresee the future…
Cybernetics is science. Theory of mass service(AKA queuing theory) is science. Well, it’s technically mathematics study like game theory.
Paleontology is also a science to study the past but doesn’t let you foresee the future.
I take a med that’s $40/month after insurance which isn’t that bad for such a specific medication, but the discount card from the manufacturer cuts it down to $5/month.
