Medicare is “cracking down” I am told. From now on I can only get one blood sugar test strip a day because I only have Type 2 diabetes. I used to get two a day and I could have ordered more. (The price IS crazy: $100 for 50 — $150 for 100 — wonder what size flat screen TV Samsung could build in Korea and ship here for $150?).
Meantime Congress actually instituted a rule long ago that the government cannot bargain with pharmaceutical companies over the price of drugs. Can’t crack down — have to crack down. What gives? ???
Meantime there is now a (mostly side effect free) cure for Hepatitis C — could wipe it out like polio was. Cost of manufacture (at $150 a patient fo r3 million patients): $450 million (how much the chief scientist on the project made for himself on the sale to another drug company, Gilead). Cost to you (us): $300 billion! !!!
The penicillin of cancer? Start turning over gold bars from Fort Knox if the nation wants this. Got to read Medical News Today online — more stuff like this seems like every week. But the pharmaceutical companies are going to want our first born children.
Anybody in the world can do what they do: manufacture drugs. Every poorest region in the world has their own pharmaceutical companies. Ours get to patent the work of academic researchers for themselves and then extort a king’s ransom. Imagine if Gilead developed the polio vaccine. Sorry little kids.
Good points Denis. Would like to see some politicians go after Big Pharma the way a few have gone after the Big Banks. What is particularly galling is that the standard response by the hogs–they are greedier than pigs and deserve to be slaughtered–is that they reinvest the obscene profits in expensive research and development. In fact somewhere around 97% of research is done by the federal government with your and my tax dollars.
What excites me today is the report that Obama will use his visit to Wisconsin to announce that the overtime rules apply to salaried workers making up to $50K a year. While some might argue it should be even higher this is a significant step to help working men and women of this country and should have been done in 2008
Re strips you choose an expensive one: if you go to walmart its 100 strips for $35. (and you can do it mail order) the meter itself is $14. (the price of the strips has come down over the last few years it used to be $50.
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Thanks a lot Lyle. Just goes to show how much more ridiculous the gov is to “crack down” on small change while getting ready to pack up the whole economy and deliver it to the drug cartels.
I said something like this on another thread and got my head chewed off slowly because ACA is going to make it possible for everyone to afford all this wonderful medicine. The rich will pay for it all, you see.
and just to prove that i really am a curmudgeon as well as an ignoramus i tend to believe that cholesterol medicine is a medical fad, like never eating eggs was for twenty years. but it will be sold to all the worried well, at a price they could never afford, but with the help of mandatory insurance “we” can all pay for it together.
please note, it may well be that i am an ignoramus as well as a curmudgeon, but one should consider the possibilities that some medical care is “not cost effective” (to put it politely), but the medical-insurance-congressional complex may not feel incentivized to hold costs down now that they have found a way to make medical consumers of us all.
Thanks for pointing out how expensive healthcare is in the United States.
Hopefully, your attitude about this(like Terry’s) will become an important part of the coming Dem Primaries and eventually be addressed by Congress and the Executive Branch.
Medicare is “cracking down” I am told. From now on I can only get one blood sugar test strip a day because I only have Type 2 diabetes. I used to get two a day and I could have ordered more. (The price IS crazy: $100 for 50 — $150 for 100 — wonder what size flat screen TV Samsung could build in Korea and ship here for $150?).
Meantime Congress actually instituted a rule long ago that the government cannot bargain with pharmaceutical companies over the price of drugs. Can’t crack down — have to crack down. What gives? ???
Meantime there is now a (mostly side effect free) cure for Hepatitis C — could wipe it out like polio was. Cost of manufacture (at $150 a patient fo r3 million patients): $450 million (how much the chief scientist on the project made for himself on the sale to another drug company, Gilead). Cost to you (us): $300 billion! !!!
Just to throw in a couple more examples:
(3/29/15) ” … new [cholesterol] drugs could eventually add as much as $150 billion to the national health-care bill.”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/new-type-of-cholesterol-drug-could-prove-costly-1426817085
(6/29/15) New cancer treatment shows promise in lab trials
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/296024.php
The penicillin of cancer? Start turning over gold bars from Fort Knox if the nation wants this. Got to read Medical News Today online — more stuff like this seems like every week. But the pharmaceutical companies are going to want our first born children.
Anybody in the world can do what they do: manufacture drugs. Every poorest region in the world has their own pharmaceutical companies. Ours get to patent the work of academic researchers for themselves and then extort a king’s ransom. Imagine if Gilead developed the polio vaccine. Sorry little kids.
Good points Denis. Would like to see some politicians go after Big Pharma the way a few have gone after the Big Banks. What is particularly galling is that the standard response by the hogs–they are greedier than pigs and deserve to be slaughtered–is that they reinvest the obscene profits in expensive research and development. In fact somewhere around 97% of research is done by the federal government with your and my tax dollars.
What excites me today is the report that Obama will use his visit to Wisconsin to announce that the overtime rules apply to salaried workers making up to $50K a year. While some might argue it should be even higher this is a significant step to help working men and women of this country and should have been done in 2008
Re strips you choose an expensive one: if you go to walmart its 100 strips for $35. (and you can do it mail order) the meter itself is $14. (the price of the strips has come down over the last few years it used to be $50.
How new drugs helping millions of Americans live longer are also making them go broke
By Ana Swanson June 30
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/30/how-new-drugs-helping-millions-of-americans-live-longer-are-also-making-them-go-broke/
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Thanks a lot Lyle. Just goes to show how much more ridiculous the gov is to “crack down” on small change while getting ready to pack up the whole economy and deliver it to the drug cartels.
Gosh Denis
I said something like this on another thread and got my head chewed off slowly because ACA is going to make it possible for everyone to afford all this wonderful medicine. The rich will pay for it all, you see.
and just to prove that i really am a curmudgeon as well as an ignoramus i tend to believe that cholesterol medicine is a medical fad, like never eating eggs was for twenty years. but it will be sold to all the worried well, at a price they could never afford, but with the help of mandatory insurance “we” can all pay for it together.
please note, it may well be that i am an ignoramus as well as a curmudgeon, but one should consider the possibilities that some medical care is “not cost effective” (to put it politely), but the medical-insurance-congressional complex may not feel incentivized to hold costs down now that they have found a way to make medical consumers of us all.
Denis,
Thanks for pointing out how expensive healthcare is in the United States.
Hopefully, your attitude about this(like Terry’s) will become an important part of the coming Dem Primaries and eventually be addressed by Congress and the Executive Branch.