The “for profit” angle is killing us. Literally.
I’m a pharmacy tech and my latest nightmare is a new drug to treat blepharitis caused by fucking eye mites, of all things. It’s the only drug of its kind, so the price is ridiculous—almost $2400 for a 5 mL bottle (a 6-week treatment). No way in hell it costs this much to make, it’s just the only such drug there is yet.
So how are people paying for this? If they make under a certain threshold of income—$102,000 married and $75,000 single—there’s a copay assistance program where if they qualify, their copay is $0. Who runs this glorious foundation? THE COMPANY THAT MAKES THE DRUG—who then writes off the “loss” on their own taxes.
There are similar programs for drugs that run $8000, $9000, $80,000 A MONTH, and the drug companies are raking in the bucks doing this.
Lots of drugs here cost a mere fraction in other countries. There’s a cancer drug in India that costs $4/pill. Here, it’s thousands. Ozempic in Germany? $5 copay. Here? GLP-1 drugs average around $5000.
It’s depressing. Every damned thing is geared to cost us as much as possible whilst garnering maximum profits for shareholders in these companies.
I previously worked in acute care transcription for years. I saw how big a percentage of people have lousy or no insurance, so they use the ER as their primary care—and then never pay the bill. (Our public hospital will often cover meds prescribed as a 30-day trial, so many folks go without after that—and wind up back in the ER repeatedly for the same problems.) We’re told that these “freeloaders” are the reason healthcare costs are so high—because the rest of us are covering their freebies.
Nope. It’s fucking greed contaminating the whole system. My favourite hospital to transcribe for was in Toronto, and NOTHING worked this way.
I really, really hoped we’d have a mass of Luigi clones by now trying to fix this crap. Unfortunately, everyone’s distracted by the fascist takeover and resistance efforts are scattered.
No reason at all that we should be the only “first-world country” to not have socialized healthcare except that capitalism is the worst cancer of all.
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