There is a Walmart about a mile from my house. Inside my Walmart is a pharmacy and Quest Diagnostics. I’ve used both at various times. A Walmart a few miles away has a low-cost veterinary clinic that I’ve used as well. Another location near me has an optometrist on site.
Category: Cost of Healthcare
Free Market Competition Is the Way to Lower the Cost of Insulin and Other Drugs
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.
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.
Indiana Bill Would Allow Associate Physicians in Underserved Areas Work
The state of Indiana has a bill before the Legislature (SB 400) that would allow medical graduates who have not matched to a residency to practice under licensed physicians. This is important because more than 10,000 medical graduates fail to match to a residency program each year. Many of those will try again the following year but many will ultimately never complete a residency program. In most states medical graduates who never complete a residency will never have an opportunity to care for patients.