I don't want to defend most Big Pharma companies, becuase just like in any business, a few bad apples spoil the basket. But, knowing what I know in what goes into the manufacturing processes for drugs, I can tell you it's expensive. Yes, you have to make a decent profit, because unlike other commodities sold on a market, drug failures are about 90%.
Here's a manufacturing similarity: If Toyota created 100 different types/lines of cars, gave about 5000-12000 people their own car to drive around for 5-7 years before deciding only 10 of them would actually work/sell, what do you think a new Landcruiser would cost you today? Oh, and by the way, the 10 cars you just made are going to be copied by Nissan 7 years after you start selling them and there is nothing you can do about it?
You opened it
Yes, I agree whole-heartedly and am much healthier today than I was 12 months ago because of big Pharma and reasonable healthcare coverage. In '09 it was discovered that I had a chronic blood infection that impacts something like 5 million Americans. I have none of the risk categories for this particular illness other than my mother having numerous transfusions prior to my birth (before this particular bug was known). I went through an agonizing treatment in '09 that failed ....
Fast forward to late last year and there is a new treatment available. 95+% cure rate ... only one hitch, it costs $90K per month for 3 months of treatment. It took me, my doctor, and his treatment nurse 3 months of wrangling with insurance before they would pay it and in the end, it appears the treatment worked (I will proclaim myself fully clear when the January 2016 lab results come in). But here's the deal ... the alternative was continuing to live with a disease that runs a better than 80 percent risk of leading to cancer prior to my 65th birthday. Probabilistic finance says the present cost of the treatment was far and away less than the potential for chemo and transplant surgery down the road. The treatment was expensive as hell, but there have been 3 other drugs in the intervening years that looked promising, but failed clinical trials. The short answer is that as of now, the costs to bring a pharma drug to market are outrageous and these companies have to have some hope of recouping their investment or their will be no new drugs. The question becomes, how much is too much? I sure as hell don't know the answer, but I do know that the system discriminates and by a lot of measures is broken. I am not smart enough to come up with an answer.
I typically stay off politics and religion (since in many places is the same), but ACA was supposed to ensure that I, as an employer, provided decent healthcare to my employees. No biggie, we have to do that anyway to attract and retain good talent. The part that was not mentioned is how much more we had to pay due to insurance increases resulting from ACA. That sucked.
Tell me about it. The last three years renewals for the small company that, until April, I helped run were in the 40% range, then 35%, then 27% for 2015. In three years, the health insurance premiums went up 240%. We shifted some burden to the employees, but that is still one heckuva lot of money that we had to eat. At best, we were getting 2-4% price increases from our customers. With a business with 70% of the cost structure is people, increases like this are crippling. And the reporting / compliance issues that are buried in the ACA are even worse. IMO, the ACA would be better known as the ASBA (Anti Small Business Act).
For example "Izzy, we have reduced the time dramatically from the time you enter the ER to the time we get you to a room" Me "but does the time to actually see a doctor and get treatment got better?" them "well, no, that was not our goal, why do you ask?" Nuff said.
I believe it. When we went to the ER last August for Jennifer's shattered wrist (which ended up requiring a plate, a pin, and 5 screws), we were shown to a room within 15 minutes. The next 4 hours were spent grilling me since Jennifer was in so much pain she could not talk. 3 hours into it, she got two Tylenol. At 4 hours, they x-rayed the wrist and the pressure on me subsided since they could tell that I had not inflicted the wound (good thing I was not carrying that day). At 5 hours we finally saw a doc and she was given some pain meds ...
The lady in the room next to us who had a rash and basically needed a benadryl (in the fawking ER) got better treatment than we did ...
In short, the treatment in the Er was no better than I could have provided if I had had my kit with a SAM splint in the RV. But it cost right at $8K for 7 hours of time, of which 2 hours was actual treatment (being generous in my time recollection).
Now the insurance company won't pay $51.29 of the bills even though they admit that Jennifer had met her out of pocket and OrthoCarolina is sending some pretty ugly nastigrams over such a small amount. We are taking the attitude of "eff em". The insurance company will not let us handle it saying that OC needs to call them and OC tells us that the insurance company will not return phone calls. I dare those fawkers to come collect ....
I am climbing down offa the soapbox and working to reduce my blood pressure ....
