Op-Ed: Big rises in prescription costs disgusting, worse than diseases

As a sign of insensitivity of the highest magnitude, as well as impracticality of a truly staggering degree, not to say commercial insanity, this would be hard to top. The New York Times:

With the new pricing system, insurers abandoned the traditional arrangement that has patients pay a fixed amount, like $10, $20 or $30 for a prescription, no matter what the drug’s actual cost. Instead, they are charging patients a percentage of the cost of certain high-priced drugs, usually 20 to 33 percent, which can amount to thousands of dollars a month.

The system means that the burden of expensive health care can now affect insured people, too.

No one knows how many patients are affected, but hundreds of drugs are priced this new way. They are used to treat diseases that may be fairly common, including multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, hemophilia, hepatitis C and some cancers. There are no cheaper equivalents for these drugs, so patients are forced to pay the price or do without.

What’s to say? “Bring out your dead”?

Insurers say the new system keeps everyone’s premiums down at a time when some of the most innovative and promising new treatments for conditions like cancer and rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis can cost $100,000 and more a year.

But the result is that patients may have to spend more for a drug than they pay for their mortgages, more, in some cases, than their monthly incomes.

The system, often called Tier 4, began in earnest with Medicare drug plans and spread rapidly. It is now incorporated into 86 percent of those plans. Some have even higher co-payments for certain drugs, a Tier 5.

Now there’s an innovation. Never mind the benefits, reduce the premiums, which are ridiculously high, anyway. The premiums, O lofty and inspired geniuses, are paid so people can afford the medicine. The idea of insurance is it offsets costs, not creates them. This is simply an insult to the intelligence. There’s a case in the NYT article where a policy holder is informed that her husband’s prescription had gone up partly because few people have that particular disease. So more people should get the disease, which would make it cheaper for the ones who already have it. I doubt very much if DJ readers need to have the logic spelled out to them. This is just another case of a totally failed health system taking out its costs on consumers. To give some idea of relative scales of things, World War Two caused 600,000 casualties, in four years. The war was considered a bit of a problem at the time, and people were glad when it ended. The US health system is now doing that kind of damage every year, and it’s not showing any sign of ending soon. As a further indication of the absurdity of this situation: Australian pharmaceuticals are listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, which is a subsidy paid by the government that makes top line medicine affordable. It works so well that no politician will touch it. Several US states are now checking it out, because it’s so much better than their existing schemes. (Typically, American drug companies are against the PBS, presumably because it means people can afford their products. Must be awful for them.) This is truly bloodcurdling commercial and social ineptitude: No control over costs of manufacture. No attempt to market at lower costs. No concept of affordability. No mention or apparent consideration of damage to patients’ health. No plausible motive for the price increases. No evidence of interest in the very large numbers of sick people affected. So any number of Americans can now look forward to trying to cope with the costs of medicine, while trying to cope with serious diseases? If you were looking for a way to destroy the quality of life of the American public, it’s really unlikely you could find a more effective way of doing it. In the whole of American history, no war has threatened more than a small fraction of the population at any one time. The health industry, however, threatens a large section of the population on a daily basis. A hundred 911s and Katrinas combined couldn't possibly affect as many people as this fee structure, and unfortunately, that's an understatement. The health system in the US is a very ugly, brutal, thing, unworthy of description as anything other than a systemic atrocity, an obscenity. This new attempt to produce a living hell for chronically sick people is an obscenity on top of an obscenity. For decades, now, the costs have risen, people have suffered and died, and nothing, at all, has improved. With a few exceptions, Presidential and Congressional sheep have bleated, and achieved nothing in a generation. What used to be the world's biggest and best health system is now one of the worst in the English speaking world. As an added insult, it's also by far the most expensive, while being one of the worst. There’s no vestige of rational thought, no sign of planning, no indication of anything but a concerted effort at extortion aimed at seriously ill people. If you point a gun at somebody, threaten their lives, and demand money, it’s called a crime. If you point a medical cost at somebody, threaten their lives, and demand money, it’s called “business”. May all American health insurers be damned a thousand times, for a thousand eternities, and be charged equally exorbitant rent while in hell... to cover costs.