Costs plus in pharmacy
Lifted from comments on Conundrum on waste and value in American healthcare deserves a nod.
Reader Denis points us to this NYT article:
The soaring cost of a simple breath
“The arsenal of medicines in the Hayeses’ kitchen helps explain why. Pulmicort, a steroid inhaler, generally retails for over $175 in the United States, while pharmacists in Britain buy the identical product for about $20 and dispense it free of charge to asthma patients. Albuterol, one of the oldest asthma medicines, typically costs $50 to $100 per inhaler in the United States, but it was less than $15 a decade ago, before it was repatented. ”
Etc., etc. The core problem here is nobody is minding the store for the average person — on this or any other issue — people don’t even know what is happening to them. Core answer: re-unionization. There has to be an effective modality by which to do it: legally mandated, sector-wide labor agreements: everybody working at the same category of job in the same locale works under one commonly negotiated agreement: the end of the race to the bottom and the automatic restoration of powerful lobbying for the average person.
David Broder, late “dean of the Washington press corp”, wrote that, when he came to Washington 50 years ago, all the lobbyists were union.
Jimmy Hoffa achieved something like this with the National Master Freight Agreement — putting almost all truckers in America under one contract. A local could negotiate a better paying contract but not a lower paying one.
http://www.teamster.org/content/view-national-master-freight-agreement-nmfa-and-regional-supplements
Anybody out there, anywhere want to pick up on the topic of sector-wide labor agreements for America — if somebody doesn’t start talking it up it will never happen — THE ONLY PRACTICAL, IN THE MECHANICAL SENSE, WAY BACK.