81–86 of 86 posts
Note: this is less than one half of one percent of total Medicare spending.
A billion here, a billion there, soon you're talking real money
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The marginal cost of a cup of coffee is basically nil but I don’t expect a free cup every day from Starbucks.
Other way around. Starbucks gives you the first cup free, because it means the rest of your cups that year are free to you - you've hit your deductible and soon after your out-of-pocket max - but Starbucks gets to charge insurance $500/cup for them. If they didn't have the program, no one would pay the first $500 because it's out of pocket, and Starbucks gets nothing. By forgoing the first $500 of revenue they get th…
If you're angry about this, I can't imagine how angry you'll be when you find out our government sent 40 billion to pay Ukranian pensions from another illegal proxy war they helped start and have funded for the past eight years. The US government doesn't care about its citizenry and the two political parties play off one another to further enable their own agendas and further divide the citizenry. They are no differe…
If one of the goals to the US gov. is to also save American lives, then obviously a proxy war is more favorable than a direct conflict.
Not doing anything at all was never an option for the US - sans of having a Russian puppet ruler as president, and deliberately going for isolationism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other way around. Starbucks gives you the first cup free, because it means the rest of your cups that year are free to you - you've hit your deductible and soon after your out-of-pocket max - but Starbucks gets to charge insurance $500/cup for them. If they didn't have the program, no one would pay the first $500 because it's out of pocket, and Starbucks gets nothing. By forgoing the first $500 of revenue they get th…
How do I hit my deductible if I didn’t pay for the first dose?
https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/copayment-adjustment-pr...
Not just generics. Ever get a coupon from a drug manufacturer that drops your copay from hundreds of dollars to $10 or $20? Ever wonder why? It’s because Medicare gets an automatic discount (I think 20% these days but I’m no longer in the biz) from the manufacturer’s official price. So they simply set the official price at some huge figure and rake in huge bucks from the largest buyer, Medicare. Then they negotiate w…
It doesn't just let them fuck Medicare, it lets them fuck private insurance too. I'm on a med that's $12k every two months. If I were on a high deductible plan, they'll happily cover that $12k for the first go, because I meet my deductible and then insurance pays the other five doses. The cost to them is basically nil; chances are the actual one mililiter of fluid costs them a marginal $20 or so to make.
quoting production prices when discussing duds is as silly as talking about IP when discussing grocery store item costs. “Bananas at 1$!? They probably didn’t even need to spend any money on inventing it”
When you pay for a drug, your not paying for production, transport or marketing, you’re paying for the 20 years of research that went into bringing it from a random idea of “this might work” to a product on the market, and for the 200 other drugs the company tried unsuccessfully to bring to market along side it.
Now I’m not saying this justifies the prices of all drugs, but it’s silly to discuss pricing while acting like the absolutely largest factor doesn’t even matter.