- More details on Biden’s plan to seize drug company patents.
- Update: 2 million, rather than previously reported 1 million, Social Security retirees got clawback letters last year.
- First-ever gene editing therapies approved to cure sickle cell disease.
- Canada’s system of socialized medicine now has the longest wait times to receive medical treatment ever recorded.
- Scholarly studies: consumer directed health plans reduce health care spending by approximately 5–15 percent relative to similar plans with lower deductibles and without spending accounts.
Category: Drug Prices & Regulations
Biden Administration Stalling Trump’s Drug Reimportation Rule
It is true that Americans pay the highest price for drugs of any country. If you want to know why, buy an economics textbook and read up on price discrimination, price controls and the effect of third-party payment on medical prices.
Thursday Links
- Breakthrough medical technology is working: Cancer drugs that function like heat-seeking missiles deliver chemicals directly to tumors.
- After years of writing and talking about health care, Jeff Goldsmith finally experiences it: the good, bad, and ugly.
- A downside of the IRA Act’s cap on out-of-pocket patient costs: “We anticipate that the use of tools like prior authorization or step therapy will increase in frequency or intensity. For providers, this will potentially increase administrative burdens and may affect the timeliness of care delivery.”
- How could a new budget commission succeed, given the failure of Simpson-Bowles? On cutting waste in Defense, Alam Simpson told me we have 1,000 bases overseas.
Drug Donation Programs Slowly Spread Across the Country
When I was a kid we never threw out unused prescription medications. Antibiotics and pain relievers were especially always saved and used, sometimes not necessarily by the person to whom they were prescribed. Of course, drugs that had a very specific purpose like my mother’s thyroid medication were not shared for obvious reasons. If a prescription brand or strength was change the old pills would languish in the bathroom medicine cabinet. As unorthodox as this may sound, it’s catching on with states, sort of.