Consider the drug, Trikafta, for cystic fibrosis. It’s a specialty drug that costs nearly $14,000 for a prescription, or about $346,000 a year. The patent(s) are not expected to expire for another 11.5 years. Of course, very few cystic fibrosis patients can afford that, but they’re not expected to. Their health insurers or employee health plans are supposed to pony up $350k a year on their behalf. To some degree you can thank Obamacare for hyper expensive drugs. By banning annual caps and lifetime caps on benefits (and mandating drug coverage) the Affordable Care Act created a market for completely unaffordable drugs.
Category: Medical Tourism
Friday Links – 22 May 2026
- Fracking has saved US consumers $3 to $4 trillion.
- Trump out-of-pocket limit for bronze plans in 2027: $15,600 for an individual and $27,600 for a family in 2027. (What are they thinking???)
- Are we underestimating health care productivity gains?
- Evidence that immigrant labor adds to the workforce and output and does not substitute for domestic labor or domestic labor output.
- Using ice may make pain last longer.
- Even when crime falls in America, it still generally leaves us about 5x as violent as Europe.
- Unbelievable: California Medicaid coves exorcisms.
Long Term Care a Long Way from Home
Long term care is expensive. According to the American Council on Aging, the average cost per day for a shared nursing home room is $327. That works out to be about $10,000 a month for an annual cost of nearly $120,000. Few families can afford that, but consider this: A private nursing home room in Santa Rosa, California is $1,000 a day for a yearly cost of $365,000.
Another View of Hungary
Orban has shared a continent for the last decade with governments that in the name of liberalism perpetuate their own soft tyrannies, their own traducement of human rights and human dignity.
It is not Hungary but Britain that regularly arrests and imprisons its citizens for social media posts. It is not Hungary but Finland and Iceland where Christians can face legal harassment for expressing traditional views on sexuality and marriage. It is not in Hungary but in the Netherlands that young people suffering from psychiatric conditions can be euthanized.
Source: Ross Douthat, NYT