As President Trump looks toward the next election, a new poll finds that a growing percentage of adults did not have enough money to pay for prescription medicines over the past year and only a fraction of Americans believe he is doing enough to lower drug costs, which is a key campaign issue for him.
To wit, 22.9% reported they lacked the funds this past September to pay for a prescription during the previous 12 months, up from 18.9% in January. All totaled, about 58 million adults experienced “medication insecurity,” according to a new poll from Gallup and West Health, a group of nonprofit and nonpartisan organizations focused on lowering healthcare costs for seniors.
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Well, we all know that nothing is getting done in Washington D.C until the witch hunt the democrats have for president
Trump is finally over! That being said, I wonder if any of our legislators thought of looking at the PBM’s and just followed the money to see where it mysteriously disappears !!! Look at the spread pricing, look at the DIR fees, look
at the lack of transparency that exists with the PBM’s. The pharma industry is the most regulated industry in the
country. Yet there are NO LAWS that regulate the PBM’s. You can bet your booty that PCMA donated mega bucks to
the Trump 2020 re-election . These PBM’s are making billions of dollars in profits and the average American can’t afford
to buy their medication.
PBM’s claim they negotiate better prices on drugs. Do PBM’s buy drugs? NO they don’t, pharmacies buy drugs, PBM’s
have no stake in what the price is except to steal the price spread and the drug rebates that Mr. Trump just so happened
to “pull the plug on” as he had said. The only one’s who see what the problem is, are the hard working pharmacists that
are getting reimbursed below their cost because the PBM’s negotiated a lower price that doesn’t really effect them.
How is it legal that PBM’s can own pharmacies and also be the ones who decide how much they pay themselves and
how much others get paid?
FACT: PBM’s overpaid themselves $300 million dollars for Medicaid claims in New York last year. Last count there are
Attorney Generals from 31 states looking into the dealings of the PBM’s. You do the math !!!!!!!!!
This is easy. Allow Medicare to negotiate (actual negotiation, not the punitive tax version Pelosi proposes) and cap all out-of-pocket costs for drugs to $1000/year.
The out-of-pocket costs cap will allow patients to have access to drugs. Medicare can negotiate to get lower costs for the Medicare budget. And private payors can either cover fewer unnecessary drugs (what most other countries do) or raise premiums to maintain cost controls. If people do not like the narrower drug coverage, they can pay higher premiums; if they do not like higher premiums, they can accept narrower drug coverage. This is essentially what all other developed countries do. This allows patients to both be able to afford drugs and for the system to stay solvent.
We should probably also negotiate better trade deals with other high-income countries (especially in Europe) to equalize the drug prices. Europeans are really free-riding off the US drug market. We pay the higher prices, and they free-ride off the innovation due to the high prices.
By better trade deals, I mean in a collaborative, international way. Like how we used to do it, not what the President does right now.
It makes sense that more women than men experience “medication insecurity” given that the majority of patients who suffer autoimmune disease are female. These diseases – MS, RA lupus etc. may require treatment expensive biologic drugs.
Refs: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3328995/
https://www.aarda.org/who-we-help/patients/women-and-autoimmunity/