91–100 of 191 posts
So is the cost actually low? The last time this came up on HN people agreed the costs are standard and the other pharmacies do not charge the high prices on the comparisons.
It depends on the drug. Shipping is enough to make it more expensive than Costco or GoodRX in some cases. YMMV.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
UK per capita health expenditure: $4650USD (#17). US per capita health expenditure: $11000USD (#1). I don't know what the 'left' is doing there but it seems very efficient.
Would be interesting to compare also with countries like Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Singapore etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the homepage they say they markup the manufacturing cost by 15%, include $3 for pharmacy labor, and finally apply shipping and handling based on location. It seem even with such healthy margins they're still an order of magnitude cheaper for some medications. Big Pharma looks obscene sometimes.
> Big Pharma looks obscene sometimes. Sometimes? The medical industrial complex's MO is to squeeze as many people (in the USA) as they can for every penny they have. The American sheeple have been duped to vote against their own best interest (a single-payer system). We don't have the best medical care in the world and we pay at least 10x for it.
As always the issue with privatized social services is that the goal is to make money, not to provide a service so the incentives are fundamentally misaligned. For-profit care providers make money when the fail to provide care. When they fail to cover procedures. When they can substitute lower-quality or less effective goods and services. When they can sell you catastrophic cover with deductibles and co-pays too high…
If for-profit companies keep doing all these awful things, why people keep paying them money?
An extreme case of this (in some places) is the internet provider. If they know they're the only ones they can basically charge much more than if you were living in an area with healthy competition. What're you gonna do, not use the net?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's hope you make a better fist of it than the UK - the NHS is currently unreformable to any significant degree, due to it being weaponised by the left.
We all know the answer to this. Every single person in the world. The way to fix the US system is for the health insurance market to be regulated like the auto insurance market, i.e., break up the state monopolies. Then for our employers to give us the money they're paying on our behalf. Then we could shop for a health insurance plan like auto insurance. Within a couple of years, the market would start sorting out th…
As always the issue with privatized social services is that the goal is to make money, not to provide a service so the incentives are fundamentally misaligned. For-profit care providers make money when the fail to provide care. When they fail to cover procedures. When they can substitute lower-quality or less effective goods and services. When they can sell you catastrophic cover with deductibles and co-pays too high…
As a Canadian I highly disagree. And anecdotally many health care providers from Canada agree with my take. People frequently die, or get sicker, as they wait their turn in months long queues or lack of supply due to government quotas.
There is nothing stopping the government from substituting lower-quality, less effective procedures when their MBAs come in an consult about how to reduce costs.
As always the issue with privatized social services is that the goal is to make money, not to provide a service so the incentives are fundamentally misaligned. For-profit care providers make money when the fail to provide care. When they fail to cover procedures. When they can substitute lower-quality or less effective goods and services. When they can sell you catastrophic cover with deductibles and co-pays too high…
One thing lost on people is the "for-profit" motive is not solely with insurers or plan providers. Medical practitioners in my experience are extremely motivated to provide as many services as the insurer will pay for regardless of how medically useful they are. This results in often legitimate procedures being denied. But make no mistake, the care providers billing insurance are just as likely or more likely to try…
The shitty ones, maybe. I know many physicians who acknowledge that unnecessary tests lead to unnecessary interventions, which is proven to reduce quality of life and decrease outcomes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's hope you make a better fist of it than the UK - the NHS is currently unreformable to any significant degree, due to it being weaponised by the left.
We all know the answer to this. Every single person in the world. The way to fix the US system is for the health insurance market to be regulated like the auto insurance market, i.e., break up the state monopolies. Then for our employers to give us the money they're paying on our behalf. Then we could shop for a health insurance plan like auto insurance. Within a couple of years, the market would start sorting out th…
As always the issue with privatized social services is that the goal is to make money, not to provide a service so the incentives are fundamentally misaligned. For-profit care providers make money when the fail to provide care. When they fail to cover procedures. When they can substitute lower-quality or less effective goods and services. When they can sell you catastrophic cover with deductibles and co-pays too high…
> Socializing the whole thing is significantly better. As a Canadian I highly disagree. And anecdotally many health care providers from Canada agree with my take. People frequently die, or get sicker, as they wait their turn in months long queues or lack of supply due to government quotas. There is nothing stopping the government from substituting lower-quality, less effective procedures when their MBAs come in an co…
My father fell off a ladder and had a pretty severe head injury, and had both an MRI and a CT scan within a half hour, at no cost. Yes, lower-priority conditions may have to wait, but it's also by definition because they're lower priority - and they'll have to wait in America too.
The idea that the Canadian healthcare system is somehow leaving people to wait and die in a way the American system is not, is a falsehood propagated by major American insurers and their lobbying group AHIP. Here's a Cigna executive apologizing for doing just that. [1]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/27/884307565/after-pushing-lies-...
There's a $5 shipping fee that isn't included until check out, so for a lot of cheap drugs it's still cheaper to go thru GoodRX/Walmart/other discount programs.
Are you looking at the right place? I clicked on the medication's link (just for lookup), and it took me to a page which listed Manufacturing, 15% Markup, Pharmacy Labor and in a circled blue box: "* additional cost at checkout Shipping $5.00".
The original point is that if you include that cost, then their prices for many drugs are no longer the cheapest.