[HN Gopher] A $20 drug in Europe requires a prescription and $80...
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A $20 drug in Europe requires a prescription and $800 in the U.S.
Author : geox
Score : 103 points
Date : 2025-12-05 21:27 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.statnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.statnews.com)
| jaggederest wrote:
| It's a very interesting drug. There are a lot of concerns right
| now around PFAS in water supplies, for example, and
| Miebo/Evotears are pure PFAS (perfluorohexyloctane) that's
| instilled directly in the eye, giving you a dose somewhere around
| a million times higher than levels of concern in drinking water.
|
| But it is absolutely revolutionary if you have dry eyes. Quotes
| include "I feel like my eye is actually too wet now"
| wagwang wrote:
| What the fuck... what's stopping this from poisoning our water
| supply?
| theMMaI wrote:
| The absolute miniscule volume
| wagwang wrote:
| Pfas are measured in ppb or even ppt
| terminalshort wrote:
| And water supply is measured in km^3
| wagwang wrote:
| so 1 liter of eye drop per 1ppt of km^3
| terminalshort wrote:
| That would be 1 liter of the active ingredient, not 1
| liter of the eye drop. Also I don't believe that 1 ppt of
| this stuff is harmful when people are putting it directly
| in their eyes without severe harm.
| daedrdev wrote:
| Good thing there are 3*10^21 atoms of H2O in a water drop
| wagwang wrote:
| Ok and there are around that many atoms of pfas per tear
| drop?
| autoexec wrote:
| How many gallons of Miebo/Evotears do you think are
| manufactured every year?
| dotancohen wrote:
| Multiply that by the t in ppt. How many trillions of
| gallons of water do you think an average city uses every
| year?
| andy99 wrote:
| Is all the Miebo/Evotears that's manufactured being
| dumped directly into the drinking water supply?
| wagwang wrote:
| How do you think pfas got into the water supply in the
| first place.
| Beijinger wrote:
| You could try this:
|
| Visomitin (Emoxipine/Mexidol) eye drops are a Russian-developed
| antioxidant medication known for treating dry eyes, fatigue,
| radiation damage, and improving vision, working to protect eye
| cells from damage (oxidative stress), but it's not widely
| available or FDA-approved in the US, requiring international
| purchase or specific prescriptions, often used for cataracts or
| post-surgery recovery, focusing on cell protection rather than
| just lubrication like many Western OTC drops.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Why is it eye medication seems to be the market with the slimier
| moves? Sudden memories to when Allegran sold the patents for
| Restasis to the Awkwesasne-Mohawks to try to protect it with
| soverign immunity.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_St._Regis_Mohawk_Tribe_and...
| ghostDancer wrote:
| Nothing says capitalism and free market like good extortion on
| health products and services. That's the way to go USA.
| Aurornis wrote:
| There is no free market at play here. This is the result of FDA
| regulations not allowing anyone to sell it unless they did a
| New Drug Application first, which could cost a billion or more.
| Therefore nobody in the free market was allowed to sell it
| without putting up the capital first, which they have to
| collect back now.
|
| You could actually order this from amazon.de up until recently
| and have it shipped to you. That seems to have disappeared,
| though.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Are you saying a completely free market for drugs would be a
| good thing?
|
| An NDA requires peer-reviewed studies, and something that
| looks at least a little like scientific rigour.
|
| Of course we could just not bother with that.
|
| Is that _really_ a smart thing to do?
| terminalshort wrote:
| Require phase 1 only. That proves safety, but not efficacy.
| Require the companies to publicly release all data from
| their evaluations to the public. It's my right to decide on
| the risk / reward tradeoff, not some worthless bureaucrat
| to decide for me.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| This is true. When you look at actually free markets -- like
| the gray markets in bodybuilding drugs, "nootropics,"
| peptides, etc. -- you'll find that there's usually a race to
| the bottom on price, and that everything is _easily_
| affordable out of pocket. Quality also tends to be okay, as
| lab reports are one of the primary ways that customers rank
| and differentiate between brands.
|
| And these aren't necessarily old pharma hand-me-downs. There
| are _lots_ of novel and strange drugs (9-MBC, lol) that you
| can buy for next to nothing.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Where is a good place to start looking to access these gray
| markets?
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| peptidesciences.com among many others.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Free market is the $20 over the counter in Europe, not the USA
| way.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| out of curiosity, how much would this drug cost in Europe if they
| had required prescriptions as well
|
| the article does a good job of showing the self serving double
| speak and the lack of pursuing an OTC option in the US, but I
| want to compare costs directly, since the article also
| acknowledges that OTC would have been much cheaper than $800 in
| the US too
| Insanity wrote:
| Not a meaningful difference. I can't recall a time when I got
| prescription drugs in EU and had to pay a lot.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Europe doesn't have a single health service. There are going to
| be different prices in different countries under different
| schemes.
|
| In my EU country I get a subsidy of at least two thirds on most
| drug prices with a state prescription. But the nominal cost is
| already negotiated down by state purchasing, and I suspect
| there's some EU cooperation there. So it's impossible to say
| what the "normal" price would be.
|
| The cost of the paperwork depends on your doctor. I pay EUR3
| for new paperwork a few times a year.
|
| You can get many drugs OTC here without a prescription - more
| expensive, but it always surprises tourists who suddenly
| discover they can get many common meds (except for things like
| antibiotics and steroids) just by asking.
| Aurornis wrote:
| FYI for anyone who isn't familiar with the wacky US insurance
| situation: Nobody in the US actually pays $800 for the drug.
| That's the "list price" for insurance companies to pay. Even
| insurance companies don't pay that price because they negotiate
| their own rates with the drug companies, which are lower.
|
| Then the drug companies come in and offer a "savings card" which
| you apply at the pharmacy like another layer of insurance. I
| searched and Miebo has one too: https://miebo.blsavingscard.com/
| You'd have to read all the fine print, but it reveals that the
| actual cash-pay price is $225 (still high, obviously) and they
| have a co-pay assistance program that reduces your copay to $0 to
| incentivize you to get your insurance billed for this drug. So a
| lot of people who take this drug in the US actually pay $0
| because they sign up for this card.
|
| The FDA is partially to blame for this situation: They required a
| complete New Drug Application before they would let anyone bring
| it to market, even though it's over the counter in other
| countries.
|
| The cost of performing a New Drug Application starts in the mid
| hundreds of millions of dollars range and can extend into the
| billions for some drugs.
|
| So nobody could feasibly introduce it to the market here without
| investing $500 million or more up front. At that price, your only
| viable option is to stick a big price tag on it and try to milk
| that money back from insurers.
| Insanity wrote:
| I think that might be worse than just having the high price.
| Such a kafka-esque systems just to get medicine.
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| Absolutely. I'd prefer to go to the pharmacy and just pay my
| $20 and go.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Do you prefer sunny (Greece) or snowy (Norway)? You can
| just pay your $20 and go. It is an option.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I prefer to pay thousands in tariffs and/or private
| companies, thank you very much. I'm not a communist.
| xnorswap wrote:
| The best thing about universal healthcare isn't how much
| money I may or may not have to pay, it's that I literally
| don't once have to think about a bill or filling out a form
| to avoid paying too much.
|
| I wouldn't care if I ended up paying more in tax than I would
| in an insurance model. The benefit is being able to 100%
| focus on my health instead of navigating a system to try to
| reduce what I'm paying.
|
| When you're diagnosed with an illness, that's a huge peace of
| mind.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> I wouldn 't care if I ended up paying more in tax than I
| would_
|
| Here, in the US, you would be burned at the stake for
| heresy, for saying that.
|
| One of the red-blooded American values, is that Taxes Are
| Bad, because rich people founded our country on a platform
| of _Don 't Tax Me, Limeys_, and it has always been designed
| as a playground for wealth.
| wang_li wrote:
| The US has a massively progressive tax system. On a net
| tax basis about 50% of the country pays nothing. Sure,
| they pay sales tax and employment taxes, but they also
| receive some mix of earned income tax credits, child tax
| credits, snap, medicaid, housing, etc. There is no real
| way for the US to have a single payer tax system without
| more people actually becoming net tax payers.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| And yet, the average American pays more in taxes for
| public healthcare (medicare, medicaid) that they don't
| receive any of, than the average European pays in taxes
| for (some kind of) universal healthcare.
|
| It's so bizarre seeing Americans in the debate not
| wanting "crazy high taxes like in Europe", because the US
| already spends twice as much public money per capita as
| the OECD average.
|
| The dirty secret of course is that healthcare as a good
| is much more expensive to produce in the US than
| elsewhere, and a large chunk of that is because the
| private insurance system adds a ton of unnecessary
| overhead. And yet all the healthcare insurance companies
| in the US talk about making healthcare "affordable for
| all". Yeah, no, they're leeches. They're rent-seekers.
| They drive up the cost of _everything_.
| christkv wrote:
| Most countries have both public and private. In Spain I
| have public and then private on top of that which 220 eur a
| month for a family of four all services included and no co-
| pay. The public option works to set a roof on what private
| insurance can charge.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Trust me it doesn't work perfectly in other countries. Yes,
| americas system is messed up but in countries like Sweden
| you will still have to navigate the system to actually get
| the healthcare you need. There are people who are denied
| healthcare in Sweden because the govt has deemed that it's
| too expensive to save them (while people with similar
| conditions and a good insurance in the US are covered).
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| All that handwaving and apology but yet
|
| >the actual cash-pay price is $225
|
| So still 11x the price, plus whatever the prescription costs.
|
| Unforgiveable.
| yread wrote:
| Well but that $225 feeds and clothes a lot of the people who
| spend all day designing these cards and systems around that
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Including Oracle, probably.
| brianherbert wrote:
| These "savings cards" have a maximum annual benefit applied to
| them so for those on insurance that do not cover those
| expensive medications or who are self-paying use up the
| benefits before year end and do in fact eventually pay full
| sticker price.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Then you switch to a difference card.
|
| That's pretty much the entire business model of GoodRx.
| khannn wrote:
| I was on a blood thinner and the medication was very pricey.
| Didn't have insurance and the "savings card" covered fuck all
| unless you had insurance. There are three blood thinners on
| the US market and they all cost a lot.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| If you don't have insurance, you're essentially fucked in
| the US but this thread is not referencing that situation.
| My CAT scan was billed for $10,000 but what I paid was
| about $200 with insurance. Without insurance I would owe
| $10k.
| maccard wrote:
| > Without insurance I would owe $10k.
|
| Without insurance you would be _billed_ $10k but in
| reality you likely end up paying less than that. It's
| still scandalous, mind you.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Why stop the conversation here? And if you don't have
| insurance but go to an ER (can't be turned away) and end
| up getting some expensive procedure you can't afford, you
| can just tell them that you're broke and they negotiate
| way, way down, or even just forgive it. And it's setup
| like this to ensure only people who have proper full time
| jobs or who can write a good enough sob story can get
| care. Because so many of the people in charge of this
| mess are far more obsessed with blocking out people they
| can't get enough data on or who aren't working, then
| figuring out reasonable public prices that make some
| effort to strike some fair market balance. So that if you
| have some savings and aren't employed, you are forced to
| find any job with benefits so you aren't left bankrupt,
| which makes taking care of health struggles harder as you
| have to work instead of take care of yourself.
| autoexec wrote:
| > So a lot of people who take this drug in the US actually pay
| $0 because they sign up for this card.
|
| They do not pay $0 because the insurance company raises the
| rates for all of their customers to cover the cost of all the
| red tape and time spent negotiating with drug companies over
| their bullshit. The insurance companies aren't eating those
| costs, they're profiting from them and it's us who end up
| footing the bill. By the time you factor in the unnecessary
| time, staff, record keeping, etc. the actual cost for the $20
| drug will be even more than the $800 sticker price.
|
| No matter how our crooked system twists things to make it look
| otherwise they always make you pay. One way or another.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Yep. And it's worse than that.
|
| 80% of prescriptions are controlled by 3 companies. You can
| look up the FTC report on it. All three of them own or are
| owned by insurance companies.
|
| The insurance companies had their profit percentage capped,
| and so the only way they could increase profits was by
| increasing their share of the pie. So they bought medical
| providers and prescription companies.
|
| Now the insurance company is both the buyer and the seller,
| but not the one who pays. We pay. So they raise the prices of
| the drug, raise the cost of insurance, and make a lot more
| money while staying in their profit percent cap.
|
| All the way around, this is the opposite of a free market and
| the FTC should be breaking these companies up. And as
| everybody knows, all the way around, it is immoral, too.
| zuppy wrote:
| what about the poor people? the ones that can't really afford
| insurance. i've heard multiple times that epipen prices are
| crazy expensive and that's a really basic drug.
| ksenzee wrote:
| If you're really poor, you can get Medicaid. It's the working
| poor who earn too much for Medicaid who are really shafted.
| The ACA tried to fix that for as many as it could, by
| expanding Medicaid to households making more money; the
| Republicans shut down the government to fight that expansion.
| It's maddening.
| yunwal wrote:
| If you're poor you just wait until you're borderline dying
| and then go to the E.R. and get charged $120,000 and then
| never pay it and then have debt collectors calling you for
| the rest of your life.
|
| Or you're on Medicaid if you live in a sane state.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Medicaid is available in all 50 states.
| trollbridge wrote:
| I got my last Epi-Pen for free, since in my state Medicaid
| has no copay for prescriptions or else it's $2 or $3.
| sov wrote:
| > The FDA is partially to blame for this situation: ...
|
| > The cost of performing a New Drug Application starts in the
| mid hundreds of millions of dollars range and can extend into
| the billions for some drugs.
|
| > So nobody could feasibly introduce it to the market here
| without investing $500 million or more up front. At that price,
| your only viable option is to stick a big price tag on it and
| try to milk that money back from insurers.
|
| It's interesting that you seem so passionate about this because
| you're totally incorrect. The cost of a NDA for a novel
| prescription drug requiring clinical data (the most expensive
| application) is ~$4.5mil. In fact, the estimated TOTAL revenue
| to the FDA from ALL PD application fees in FY 2025 is
| ~$1.3billion (or, just under 300 novel prescription drugs). So,
| obviously, FDA fees _can 't_ be as much as you're claiming.
|
| What you're _actually_ describing is the total cost of the
| entire drug development pipeline (research, design, lab costs,
| chemical costs, application costs, marketing costs, etc.) to
| develop a brand new, novel drug. And it 's only ~$200m,
| increasing to $500m if you include dead ends / failures in the
| process, and ~$900m if you include both failures and capital
| costs--yep, that's right the _capital costs alone_ are almost
| as much as _the entire rest of the drug development pipeline._
|
| See:
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
|
| And that's for novel Prescription Drugs.
|
| > They required a complete New Drug Application before they
| would let anyone bring it to market, even though it's over the
| counter in other countries.
|
| No. In that case they would pay the FDA OMUFA fees, not the FDA
| PDUFA fees, which are ten to fifty times cheaper than the PDUFA
| fees.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| in some part of europe, we have national healthcare so basically
| people don't think they are paying their medications, like there
| was some magic money.
|
| in that case, you don't care if you drug cost 10EUR or 2000EUR
| because you aren't spending a single EUR from your own wallet, at
| least if you don't factor in taxes.
|
| Contrary to the USA where it's a much more responsible market,
| people do pay for the medications or they get it paid by their
| own insurance but it cost them directly a lot of money.
|
| I would think that americans would be much more vigilant about
| what medication they take, the price it cost, and so would have
| much lower pricing. That's just how free market work, and
| technically there are many medication manufacturer and many
| customer.
|
| Is it the proof that a true unregulated free market doesn't work
| ? if left unsupervised, big companies are going to buy smaller
| companies until they are monopoly or make secret, behind the
| door, deal to keep price up.
|
| It's what the USA is made on, the idea of freedom and free
| market. i believe the idea of unregulated market is more recent,
| think the 70's, but surely in the 50 years since then american
| would have pushed back against it and not elected people like
| Trump who are all in.
| xp84 wrote:
| > I would think that americans would be much more vigilant
| about what medication they take, the price it cost, and so
| would have much lower pricing.
|
| > Is it the proof that a true unregulated free market doesn't
| work ?
|
| The market is heavily regulated (frequently crazily) by the
| FDA, and the actual amount anything costs is heavily obscured
| from the eyes of any consumers by the fog of bureaucracy and
| insurance.
|
| Many people have 3-4 tiers of fixed copays that the insurance
| company makes up - some pharmacies won't even tell you when
| there is a cash price or a "coupon" that would be cheaper than
| your insurance copay! And pharmacies don't publish a plain list
| of what the cash prices are, and it would be hard for most
| people to even produce the tier formulary, it's buried as a PDF
| in some obscure page of a horrible website. So we just go to
| the pharmacy and see what it'll cost us.
|
| Also, one major insurer owns a major pharmacy benefits manager
| and one of the big 2 pharmacy chains, so they use that to put
| their thumb on the scale however they can, while the other
| insurers and PBMs play games to lock consumers into restrictive
| exclusive deals that are to their detriment.
|
| Anyway we don't have a market at all when it comes to
| healthcare, because the majority of price information is
| withheld from consumers until the opportunity to make any
| choice, if it even existed, is well past.
| thrwwXZTYE wrote:
| The funny thing is that when you have one big customer (a
| country) - you get good prices.
|
| When you have 30 insurance companies, 10000 companies buying
| insurance policies and millions of individuals - you get shit
| prices.
|
| That's why the drug in question is 200 USD in US (after
| deductions) and 20 in Europe (including taxes).
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Part of the problem is that the way our healthcare system is
| setup, it's not even a remotely free market. It's pretty much a
| worst of all worlds situation.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| > Contrary to the USA where it's a much more responsible
| market, people do pay for the medications or they get it paid
| by their own insurance but it cost them directly a lot of
| money.
|
| That's the idea, but in practice there are so many layers of
| indirect government incentives, disincentives, and direct
| interventions that market is no longer effective for this
| purpose.
|
| It's virtually impossible to find out how much a medical
| procedure actually costs. Most hospitals and clinics refuse to
| even estimate as a policy, which has led to the creation of
| things like pre-paid services for labor and delivery. Those are
| quite rare.
|
| I'm 100% in favor of allowing the market to work - but at this
| point, we have the worst of both worlds and the best of
| neither. Either extreme would be better than what we have.
| amiga386 wrote:
| > in some part of europe, we have national healthcare so
| basically people don't think they are paying their medications,
| like there was some magic money.
|
| Europe is a big place, buddy. Which particular part are "we"
| from today?
|
| NHS England has NICE (National Institute for Health and Care
| Excellence), which does the cost-benefit analysis for all
| medicines prescribed, nationally. It frequently decides
| medicines aren't worth the money. If you, as a private citizen,
| want that particular medicine, you can waste _your own_ money
| on it. NHS England does not have a moral hazard problem.
|
| The NHS also spends money trying to convince people to
| exercise, eat well, lose weight, not smoke, look for early
| signs of cancer, etc., because they find that relatively tiny
| amounts of money on these campaigns results in _massive,
| massive_ savings from not having to treat so much preventable
| disease later in life.
| heathrow83829 wrote:
| i think healthcare is one market where capitalism just doesn't
| work well at all. for those areas, it actually makes sense to
| introduce hard or soft price ceilings.
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| > I would think that americans would be much more vigilant
| about what medication they take, the price it cost, and so
| would have much lower pricing. That's just how free market
| work, and technically there are many medication manufacturer
| and many customer.
|
| (Not american) This assumes they have a choice, no? Do these
| medications have real alternatives?
| autoexec wrote:
| > I would think that americans would be much more vigilant
| about what medication they take
|
| This is why I always check to make sure it's fiscally
| responsible before I start chemotherapy, or before buying that
| emergency inhaler for asthma, or before accepting paralytics
| and anesthesia when undergoing surgery. How fortunate that in
| America diabetics have the freedom to die rather than take
| overpriced insulin. Let the free market decide which child with
| leukemia deserves a bone marrow transplant and which deserves a
| casket. That's a much more responsible market than just having
| everybody chip in a small amount so that nobody needs to worry
| about the cost of the medications they need to live. Sure, in
| America millions will die or be bankrupted by healthcare costs,
| but that's better than spending a single EUR from your own
| wallet if a tiny fraction of it might pay for someone else's
| medications right?
| guywithahat wrote:
| I mean you're joking but there are maybe ~20 brands who
| produce and sell inhalers. Maybe I need the inhaler but I
| also have a certain amount of choice, and presumably some are
| more expensive than others. Insulin is a famous example,
| because you can buy a vial for ~$30 or a nicer one for $300.
| They all effectively do the same thing but there is a quality
| difference between them, usually in regards to release time
| and how often you'd have to take it.
|
| There are some market pressures in healthcare when multiple
| companies can compete, although it's so heavily regulated it
| can be hard to see the market pressures in practice.
| Consumers often do have some amount of choice though
| exasperaited wrote:
| > Contrary to the USA where it's a much more responsible
| market,
|
| This is satire? I can't tell anymore.
|
| I mean the USA is the only country where someone can allegedly
| murder a healthcare executive for denying treatment and popular
| culture is engaged in drooling about how well the alleged
| killer fills out a tailored shirt.
| picafrost wrote:
| The US is a GDP ponzi scheme disguised as an economy. The silly
| prices exist to shuffle money between pharmaceutical companies,
| PBMs, insurers, pharmacies, hospitals, and who knows what other
| intermediaries. Everyone takes a cut and can put large revenues
| on their balance sheet.
|
| The US today is structurally dependent on this sort of cash
| migration. If all Americans suddenly began to save 10%+ of their
| income every month (also structurally impossible for most), GDP
| would dramatically contract.
|
| These things aren't broken. They are by design.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| Good God, they have played us for fools! Everyone grab your
| pitchfork! /s
| BeetleB wrote:
| If Americans didn't pay $800 for it, how would Europeans afford
| it?
|
| </sarcasm>
| oakesm9 wrote:
| Such an easily debunkable line with even the tiniest bit of
| critical thinking.
|
| You're basically saying the drug companies subsidise a loss in
| Europe by over charging Americans, right?
|
| As the drug company is a private and doesn't have to sell
| everywhere, why wouldn't they just skip the loss making
| Europeans and just sell to Americans? They'd make more profit
| that way!
|
| That must mean they make some profit from the European prices,
| otherwise they wouldn't be bothering.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Chill dude. I added a </sarcasm> tag.
|
| But to engage seriously:
|
| > You're basically saying the drug companies subsidise a loss
| in Europe by over charging Americans, right?
|
| No - once they know how to manufacture a drug, it's dirt
| cheap for them to do so - they're still making a profit in
| Europe. The purpose of billing Americans a huge amount (other
| than they can get away with it), is to fund the research +
| trials for the next generation of drugs.
|
| Of course, even this argument doesn't hold water. I remember
| when pharmaceuticals spent more on advertising/marketing than
| on R&D (may still be the case).
| gensym wrote:
| Drug costs are dominated by the fixed costs of development.
| $20/dose may very well cover the marginal cost of production
| while being far too little to make the overall venture
| profitable.
| dh2022 wrote:
| And Medicare cannot negotiate drug prices until 2026 ( _).
| Medicare is also banned from re-importing drugs from other
| countries (ex Canada) at lower prices. Thank you president GWB,
| the Alliance to Improve Medicare, and AARP
| (!!!!)https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1126891/
|
| (_) Biden's inflation act gave Medicare permission to start
| negotiating drug prices in 2026. Who know what the current US
| Administration will do though.
| Schnitz wrote:
| It's very simple. In the US your pharmacy has a contract with the
| drug supplier that prevents the pharmacist from telling you that
| you could buy the drug without insurance for $10 while he charges
| you the $20 copay. As long as this is legal and your pharmacist's
| duty isn't to you the patient, don't waste time worrying about
| the details.
| philip1209 wrote:
| What's to stop congress from passing a blanket "most favored
| nation" law for VA + medicare on all pricing, inclusive of
| insurance rates and discounts? Seems like it would be fair and
| useful.
| autoexec wrote:
| The same thing that stops them from just joining the rest of
| the first world nations and giving us universal healthcare.
| Greed.
| dlisboa wrote:
| The US Congress doesn't pass laws anymore. Let alone fair and
| useful ones.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| >"most favored nation"
|
| There is a weird thing Americans often do when confronted with
| the incredibly high price of medicine and medical care in the
| US of imagining that every other country is actually
| responsible for this (hence the "most favored" nonsense). That
| it's zero sum and every other country is laughing and taking
| Americans for a ride and underpaying, and therefore Americans
| have to cover the bill.
|
| This is the angle Trump has taken in some of his incredibly
| ignorant and stupid screeds on this topic (as with every single
| position he has on anything): Get everyone else to pay more and
| somehow the US pays less!
|
| This...isn't at all how it works, or what the problem is.
| Americans pay more because of the whole massive scam of your
| Medical Insurance Racket, where everything has imaginary
| inflated prices and an absolutely massive middle-tier of suits
| having nothing to do with medicine are taking their cut. This
| is _your_ problem, reflected almost nowhere else on the planet,
| and it is domestic caused and will need to be fixed
| domestically. Criticizing Europe or Canada or anyone else will
| never, ever fix the utterly, insanely broken and profoundly
| stupid American system.
|
| But it won't. It's simply incredibly how easily Americans can
| be fooled into voting against their own best interests, year
| after year.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Trump already lowered costs of medicine by 1200%, what more do
| you want?
|
| We're gonna be so rich!
| Animats wrote:
| What's the price on TrumpRx.gov?
| terminalshort wrote:
| If a drug isn't one of the following it should be available over
| the counter.
|
| 1. heinously addictive
|
| 2. incredibly dangerous when not used exactly correctly
|
| 3. an antibiotic (due to the resistance externality)
|
| And for drugs that do meet one of these conditions, doctors
| should be able to write lifetime prescriptions for cases where
| the medication is used to treat a permanent condition. This
| probably covers 95% of non-antibiotic prescriptions. The savings
| from removing the gatekeepers in terms of time and money would be
| massive and the costs would be minimal.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Then who would feed the gatekeepers?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| How does it go?
|
| "First, they came for the gatekeepers. Then, they came for
| the billionaires."
| renewiltord wrote:
| What a brave thing to say on a message board which thinks
| having a conversation with a chatbot should be illegal lest you
| ask it how to deal with emotions.
| Bender wrote:
| Theoretically speaking how much would the components cost if one
| made it themselves? [1][2] My interests are purely academic _as I
| have no need for this_.
|
| [1] - https://fourthievesvinegar.org/
|
| [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rQklSmI_F0
| [video][1hr16m][DEFCON 32]
| philipkglass wrote:
| According to another comment this product is pure
| 1-(perfluorohexyl)octane [1]. There's no practical way to make
| this chemical at home, but if you buy it in bulk from an
| industrial supplier it can be had for $980-$750/kg, depending
| on how many kilograms you commit to buy at once:
|
| https://www.chemicalbook.com/ProductDetail_EN_1-perfluorohex...
|
| Add analytical lab services to analyze it for purity and you
| could still get a lifetime supply for the price of a couple of
| brand-name bottles. This is the sort of thing that some
| Americans have been doing to get cheap GLP-1 peptide drugs from
| overseas too.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorohexyloctane
| actionfromafar wrote:
| About 30 years in federal prison, probably.
| labrador wrote:
| We should in America should change our name to "The United States
| of Greed" and be done with it. There would be less confusion that
| way.
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