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Some 8.4 million Americans rely on insulin to survive, and as many as 1 in 4 patients have been unable to afford their medicine, leading them to ration doses – sometimes with fatal ramifications, according to the association.
imagine reading this in a history textbook. what would you think about this empire
People play cyberpunk games and watch cyberpunk movies with stories just like this and manage to miss the fact that we already live this way.
we already have mass surveillance, now the government just needs to take over.
now insecure cybernetic implants just need to happen, and with how neuralink is going, we're almost done.
I mean, Neuralink is just gonna end up with a whole lot of dead people. Not a lot to surveil from corpses.
Cyberpunk is supposed to be and look cool too and not just be a boring dystopia.
It's always a bummer to me to see a headline like the one in this post and we're supposed to feel good about it. Obama had a supermajority. It didn't have to be this way.
Most if not all empires were built on slavery and oppression.
I'd say all -- this leads me to believe empire in and of itself is the problem. People don't voluntarily become subjects.
Barbarianism, but elevated
Still too much. Insulin in my country is around $10+. And it's a third world country.
Yeah, exactly.
Insulin costs like 2 bucks a vial to make.
even 35 dollars is an egregious rip off.
It seems like a compromise price, though it should be free or near free at the point of "purchase" in any first world nation. The sheer fact that it was controversial to even compromise at $35 and still allow a hefty profit on a medicine you would die without is a testament to how fucked up American healthcare has become.
American Healthcare has been fucked up since insurance became standard and expected
Insurance is what allowed greed to explode in the industry. Its why you get charged 90 dollars for an a single asprin. Its why everything is fucked up, and its ruined the entire medical field for anyone who has no insurance or bad insurance.
No arguments there. I sit with an insurance plan my company pays 100% of, which is over $600/mo. The insurance company provides no co pay. I pay 100% of doctors visits until I meet the $3200 deductible per visit. And that's if they are in network, the deductible is double that if it's out of network, like say with the medical provider that controls 80% of the doctors in the area. Anthem/Elevance is beyond awful.
They have destroyed and inflated the cost of care, and provide "insurance" that only pays in the event of catastrophic care. It's a complete scam.
I have eleven thousand dollars in my health savings account. In theory, that will allow me to get sick two times. That's it. That's what I get. And I don't believe I'll even get that. Insurance finds a way to deny everything.
Also why ambulance rides went from always free to costing thousands of dollars. Localities figured out they could bill insurance for them.
Thanks, Joe.
Great to see for Americans.
Affordable health care for all is the future liberals want.
and republicans act like is the most horrific, obscene, unfathomably evil thing that ever existed, the mere notion that the poors can afford healthcare.
but then again, they are also a bunch of fucking pedophile baby fuckers that want to block the epstein list from going public because it personally incriminates them.
Beep boop. No lies detected.
And leftists continue our push for single payer with zero copsy.
Insulin should be free, fuck off.
It does require time, effort and resources to manufacture, and on top of that there's a regulatory system for quality checking so that nobody gets poisoned by a faulty batch, which is more time, effort and resources.
Some cost is reasonable. Price gouging is unreasonable and greedy. Free is also unreasonable and would create a risk of low production quality.
When people say free, they don’t mean completely free. They mean free at point of use for the patient, with the system funded by tax dollars like every other first world nation.
An example in the US would be the military. If you are in the military, either active or reserves, and need a prescription then it’s 100% free to you if you pick it up at a military pharmacy. That doesn’t mean that the manufacturer of the prescription is eating the cost, it means the federal government is using tax dollars to pay that on the back end and the military patient doesn’t pay out of pocket for it.
We could do that on a national scale for cheaper than what we collectively pay now for healthcare.
As long as there are multipler suppliers, as a single large purchaser the Government would have (and the Military already has) way more leverage to negotiate far better prices from suppliers than individuals ever could, since no one supplier wants to lose such a massive customer to their competition.
Even in a purelly rightwing 100% financial logic, it makes sense to have centralized procurement of medicines such as insuline because it's the most efficient use of resources.
Or at least it would make sense if the rightwing (which means both Democracts and Republicans since the Overtoon Window in the US is well to the Right of most of the developed world, so it's really just hard neoliberals vs quasi-fascists) weren't complete total hypocrites whose main objective is not at all managing the country as best as possible.
We could do that on a national scale for cheaper than what we collectively pay now for healthcare.
I completely agree with you, it is absolutely technically possible. We could direct all of our resources with more care.
It will never happen in the real world. It would require at least half the population to be willing to sacrifice their own self-interest in the short term in order to benefit society as a whole in the long term. One is immediate and tangible, the other is abstract and ephemeral.
🙄
The time, effort, and resources could be handled by a public industry that produces a public good. There's no reason for it to be privatized.
It can absolutely be privatised as long as some government body handles negotiations.
Letting the private sector compete for public contracts can often reduce prices and make production more efficient. It needs to be handled well of course.
It works pretty well here. The government negotiate the prices for medication to reasonable levels and every individual has a medication price cap that gradually reduces the price for medication until they are completely free (fully subsidised). After 12 months the price cap resets and the prices go up to normal. The price cap is set at ≈230 EUR.
Apparently insulin is always free and so are some other stuff.
Obviously this only applies to prescriptions.
IMO a great system is a mix of both a strong private sector and a strong public sector with non corrupt governmental oversight.
non corrupt governmental oversight
I mean, we could just wish for a unicorn pony that shits glitter and barfs rainbows while we're at it.
Not good enough.
I remember Trump saying he was going to do this during his presidency and my parents who are trump fans are like "well Biden didn't do this, Trump got it started and he took the credit". Which I don't believe for a second. So what exactly happened to Trump's original plan? I assume it only benefited the rich or something like all his plans and Biden scrapped it to replace it with something better?
If it's a good thing, Trump started it, if it's a bad thing, Biden did it
The whole argument is absurd because neither one did anything, the companies themselves did this voluntarily and can switch it back at any time because there's no federal statute or regulation to stop them
You didn't read the article did you?
They cite multiple factors but the largest seems to be a change to the way Medicare rebates are paid. Starting Jan 1st, this move allows them to pay less rebates to Medicare based on how they're calculated and will save the companies millions. So yes... it's actually directly based on the Biden administration changes.
The price gouging should never have been allowed to happen but I'm glad shit's being done about it.
Fucking go after the predatory practices of the private insurance companies and make actual change. This rebate shit thats making this happen will be overturned as soon as the only other party that ever wins gets in there. Seriously, its all so fucking exhatusting nothing actually changes ever.
Won't SOMEBODY think of the poor, poor price gaugers?
The best thing about lemmy is that one almost doesn't even need a /s here.
I'm curious as to why these companies are doing this. The article isn't clear. It does mention "public pressure" but that's never really stopped a company, especially if they are making crazy profits, from continuing to make those profits. Big pharma doesn't just stop over charging out of the goodness of their hearts.
Is there some new regulation or foreign competitor behind this?
BOOO! That's not the FREE MARKET!
-Pro Life Republicans