In 1951, Congress stopped letting drug makers decide which drugs they would sell over the counter and which would require a prescription and turned that decision over to the FDA. Drugs already available without a prescription were “grandfathered.”
That is why, to this day, people can buy regular and NPH insulin without a prescription. Because those forms of insulin are off‐patent and because consumers comparison‐shop, they are relatively cheap: “ReliOn,” a brand available from Walmart, can cost as little as $25 a vial. Evidence suggests that prescription requirements correlate with higher drug prices and that removing them correlates with reductions in drug prices.
Category: John C. Goodman
How Much Do Health Insurers Make?
Kaiser: Health insurers’ margins were more than double in Medicare Advantage than in other markets in 2021. Gross margins in the Medicare Advantage market averaged $1,730 per enrollee in 2021, compared with $768 in the Medicaid managed care market, $745 in the individual market and $689 in the fully insured group market.
Thursday Links
- Arnold Kling gives an (admittedly Jewish) view of why Christianity is unravelling.
- Claim: social media is a major cause of depression – especially in teen girls.
- Turns out its worse if the girls are politically liberal.
- There are 34 million Health Savings Accounts, holding almost $100 billion.
- Biden accuses MAGA Republicans of wanting to cut health care spending. This is after the Democrats’ IRA bill cut $307 billion out of Medicare (CBO report, p, 72) and the administration plans future large cuts in Medicare Advantage.
Wednesday Links
- Most new drugs do not cover the cost of their development. So, the pharmaceutical industry needs a few blockbusters (with annual revenues of $1 billion or more) in order to survive. HT: Tyler
- Railroad deregulation occurred under Carter, not under Trump and accidents and derailments plunged thereafter.
- Humans share 98.8 percent of their DNA with bonobos and chimpanzees.
- Is Biden about to surrender authority over US pandemic policy to the WHO?
- Prof. Marty Makary: Ten myths about Covid that were propagated by the “experts.”
- How different federal agencies view the origin of Covid.
- Yglesias on the lab leak theory.