It is true that Americans pay the highest price for drugs of any country. If you want to know why, buy an economics textbook and read up on price discrimination, price controls and the effect of third-party payment on medical prices.
Category: Drug Prices & Regulations
Thursday Links
- Breakthrough medical technology is working: Cancer drugs that function like heat-seeking missiles deliver chemicals directly to tumors.
- After years of writing and talking about health care, Jeff Goldsmith finally experiences it: the good, bad, and ugly.
- A downside of the IRA Act’s cap on out-of-pocket patient costs: “We anticipate that the use of tools like prior authorization or step therapy will increase in frequency or intensity. For providers, this will potentially increase administrative burdens and may affect the timeliness of care delivery.”
- How could a new budget commission succeed, given the failure of Simpson-Bowles? On cutting waste in Defense, Alam Simpson told me we have 1,000 bases overseas.
Drug Donation Programs Slowly Spread Across the Country
When I was a kid we never threw out unused prescription medications. Antibiotics and pain relievers were especially always saved and used, sometimes not necessarily by the person to whom they were prescribed. Of course, drugs that had a very specific purpose like my mother’s thyroid medication were not shared for obvious reasons. If a prescription brand or strength was change the old pills would languish in the bathroom medicine cabinet. As unorthodox as this may sound, it’s catching on with states, sort of.
FTC Moves Against Private Equity-Owned Physician Practice Cartels
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is beefing up its scrutiny of private equity investments in health care. This past September the FTC sued U.S. Anesthesia Partners (USAP) and the private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe in Houston federal court. The investors are accused of buying up a significant portion of large anesthesia practices in major Texas cities, allowing them to aggressively boost prices. FTC chair, Lina Khan, claims private equity investors “bought up the largest anesthesiology practices, then jacked up prices and entered into price-setting and market-allocation schemes.” Research has found that physician prices rose due to private equity investments.