Americans who are at least 65 and those with disabilities pay monthly premiums for the drug coverage under a U.S. program that started last January. Insurance companies last year charged as little as $1.87 for policies providing discounts on medicines. For next year, the cheapest plan will cost $9.50. Many of the 23 million people in the Medicare drug program pay premiums out of Social Security pensions, averaging $922.70 a month.
“Many people are going to feel that they are victims of a bait-and-switch tactic,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a Washington-based nonprofit group that studies health care, in an Oct. 3 telephone interview. “There’s no question that it will be an extraordinary disappointment.”
Now, to go along with that, two stories:
In New York last week, our friend John told us about a treatment he’s been getting for a rare skin disorder. He has to take a medication two or three times a day for a couple of weeks to sensitize his skin to UV radiation. Then the docs dose him all over with UV, and the symptoms go away for a month or two. John was surprised when his pharmacy told him that his prescription benefits had run out, and that he had fallen into the so-called “donut hole” (another story, told here); it turns out that the medication costs $18 per dose (times three times a day for two weeks, every couple of months). John checked into a Canadian supplier and found the identical drug (he’s a pharmacologist, and was quite certain that the Canadian and American pills came from the same manufacturing facility). Cost per pill from Canada: $.75. Note the decimal point.
Second story. Talking with another doc, this one a top pediatric health researcher, he told us about a study that he’d just read that looked into the provenance of 20 major new drugs that have been recently introduced to the market. Of those, just one had been developed by the manufacturer; all of the others came out of the research departments of large universities.
The truth, I’ve come to believe, is that they really truly would just as soon see us die, and the sooner the better. That will just leave more for them.
Bastards!
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