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Insulin Prices to Skyrocket under Biden Administration
Insulin back up to $1,500 for a 90 day supply. Thank President Biden. Big Pharma's investment paying off. Meanwhile, minimum wage increases looking iffy, trade protections disappearing, low-wage immigration influx incoming, energy jobs cut, and stimulus checks shrinking.
— Robert Barnes (@barnes_law) February 11, 2021
Well, that was quick.
This hits close to home. I have been a type 1 diabetic since age seven. I’m in good health though. I take care of myself, diabetes is just another thing I have to take care of on my daily to-do list. But the financial burden is a different story.
Deregulation under the Trump Administration led to me paying the lowest insulin prices I’ve ever paid. For the first time ever, I actually had money left in my flex-spending account last year. The company I work for has you select benefits for the upcoming year in October (so before the election). I hedged my bets on Trump winning, and contributed less this year. Boy was that dumb in hindsight.
In many ways, this is a return to normal. DC doesn’t care about the average person, just special interests. And Big Pharma is embedded deeper into the swamp than anyone. This is why Trump was such a threat. He fought for the average person. He didn’t achieve everything I wanted him to, and in many ways he only rhetorically fought the swamp, but there were a lot of small victories in that four years.
It’s only going to get worse from here. This is what happens when you have a population that votes completely ignorant of policy.
Published in Politics
But cannot call them names. OH no. Even when truth is the defense.
@jamessalerno. Clock rules in tournament chess don’t favor a guy with type 1 diabetes and i’ve worked baseball games with an umpire who wore a glucose monitor on his belt. The vaccine needle galls me to no end. Still, this post helps me see “past my pain” (liberal speak thrown at me during the 2020 summer riots).
I would suggest the book, Drugs, Money, and Secret Handshakes: The Unstoppable Growth of Prescription Drug Prices, by Robin Feldman, an attorney at Stanford University, who has been researching drug prices for a long time. This is an eye-glazing book, and, the author admits, the information is hardly complete, as most information on drug prices is hidden behind a wall of secrecy. But the book is worth the read as an initial foray into attempting to understand the drug pricing system in the US. Suffice it to say, it is difficult for anyone to tell you what the cost of a given drug is going to be until you present your prescription to the pharmacyThe system is utterly byzantine, completely opaque, and is best described allegorically (though unintentionally, and long before our drug pricing system even existed) by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story, “The Lottery in Babylon” Spoiler alert: Pharmacy Benefit Managers have had a large role in pushing up drug prices, as they leverage those price increases to their great financial benefit. The whole system is a scam and a fraud on the American Public, that should be immediately halted. But, as there are so many vested financial interests that are so deeply hidden, actually secret proprietary agreements, nothing will be done about this. Drug pricing in America stems almost entirely from the Federal regulatory system, not least CMS, that has incentivized a middle man system that is destroying lives and inducing utterly insane cost increases in pharmaceuticals. Even the bad guy pharmaceutical industry has not been the worst of the players, but now pharmaceutical companies are integrating vertically with Pharmacy Benefit Managers, retail pharmacy juggernauts like CVS, and Health Insurance companies to create gargantuan entities with almost unlimited clout to control drug prices and availability. The system is, I would suggest, akin to the control Big Tech has over information. Perhaps even with greater control and greater profits. It is not a healthy system at all. Joe Biden of course is a creature parasitic on this system and will only help worsen it. Trump tried to fight it, with predictable consequences.
What Nanocelt said!
I can speak to the issue of transparency. You really don’t know what you’re getting until the payment is due.
About 15 years ago, I used a mail-order prescription service. Keep in mind, that was my only option. The company forced you to use mail-order, they would only cover prescriptions at a physical pharmacy that were non-recurring. I also had to keep a credit card on file. For some reason, insulin prices could not be disclosed.
So I had to keep a credit card on file, and they could charge it whenever they wanted to (90 days wasn’t always 90 days), and I had no clue what they would be charging until the amount cleared.
This, again, is entirely the NTs fault, as their wing of the Republican Party’s NORMAL politics has always been centered on rigging the game for large corporate clients/ extortion targets. Lyin’ Ryan and McConnell gained personal power and family earning potential through the sustained lie of “we will repeal ObamaCare if you only give us power.” The congressional Republicans had 8 years to fully vet the issues in committee hearings and to shape real solutions, some of which President Trump imposed through executive orders last year.
If they had an ounce of integrity, the NT crowd would have been beating the congressional Republican leadership bloody ever since the House Republicans were given the majority and immediately broke their word in 2011. The House has the unilateral power of the purse. No spending bill moves without House approval. They had the critical lever and a true popular mandate. They lied. The House Republicans still lie.
McConnell and his gang lied that they would repeal Obamacare if only they were given the power and perks of the Senate majority. They lied. They lie. And the NT crowd supports this “normal” politics to the hilt.
This is one thing I’ll criticize Trump for. I don’t think he came off well in the debates when he was explaining his health care plans. I think it’s the marketer in him. He wants a “TrumpCare” just like Obama had. He kept mentioning that whatever replaced ObamaCare would be bigger! Better! Bolder! He really should have just been explaining what he was doing with the deregulation. But “Deregulation leads to lower prices by giving the consumer options” doesn’t roll off the tongue easily and doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker.
The system that we have right now is evil. I think we can even get leftists on board with that if they understood the entire mess. The only way someone could defend this mess is if they’re financially benefitting from it. It’s a horrible, tangled mess, rotten from the inside out.
Indeed. In fighting the corrupt Deep State in Washington and their media enablers, we have several allies on the left if we’re willing to do it.
A leftist may be an anti-statist who misidentifies the source of their problems. I’m being more open-minded this year. And I’ve actually convinced some leftists to change their views on certain things.
It’s a fight worth fighting.
Except that “deregulation” is a scam. It is not part of the real world and the Lyin’ Ryan crowd knows it. Each time healthcare is tweaked by a new law, some deep pocket benefits. Every. Time. President Trump simply leveraged the existing regulations against the Chamber of Commerce and in favor of the Forgotten Americans. That is what truly scandalizes and terrifies Mitch McConnell, Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, and Pat Toomey.
Integrity and Never Trump do not go together. The Never Trump crowd have no integrity at all. Voting for Biden, proudly voting for Biden, and then total silence on his non-conservative actions shows a that the NT crowd is not conservative at all. Indeed, they bray and bray about value but really, it is all a lie.
Never Trumpers are not at all interested in integrity, truth, or conservative values. They are interested in the “right” people having power and nothing more.
Explain in detail.
I blame the average American voter who distrusts free-market solutions more than anyone else.
Hey but cheer up. Sure many households like yours and mine are going to find a huge shift in insulin costs.
But on the other hand, someone is gonna cover the cost for you and for me of the wonderful untested COVID vaccines. The Pfizer vaccine is already having people to experience a 2.8% adverse effect for an illness that most likely would not have caused an adverse effect. (This adverse effect includes people being nauseous, cold and clammy, running a fever and missing work, things many people who have had COVID haven’t dealt with.)
If we had our priorities in order, we would keep the price of insulin low, as every year before Trump worked on having changes made, people died from not being able to afford their diabetes’ meds.
But Trump got shafted via a corrupt election process.
So now instead of common sense priced meds, we have mind melded 50% of the population to think they won’t make it into the next month if they don’t get jabbed with their share of a 264 billion dollar vaccine program. A vaccine that even Fauci and Gates have told us will only make symptoms less visible and can’t prevent an infected individual from transmitting the infection. Nor can it prevent a more serious form of the infection manifesting in a vaccinated person, and that person can still die.
It is also still up in the air, if after being vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine and then later this year, that individual encounters a different version of corona, if he or she will end up being made more susceptible to the new corona variety and die from that.
Evidence? I have never heard of a vaccine making someone more susceptible to another disease.
My eyes were opened when I prescribed Anusol HC for a patient for their hemorrhoids.
Old drug consisting of hydrocortisone in a vegetable oil carrier.
Patient called me back in tears. Said 12 suppositories were over 400 dollars.
Told her it had to be a mistake. No mistake.
This is just out and out thievery. No costs to recoup. No research to pay for. No expensive components.
This. Notice with a slim majority in the House and an essential tie in the Senate, the Democrats were ready to roll on their agenda on day one.
I will never forgive Ryan and McConnell for wasting the first 2 years of Trumps term. And the GOPe’s complicity and active sabotage of his reelection.
I’m sure if you go to the proper Anti Vax fever swamp you will find the “evidence”.
Redundant
I couldn’t agree more. I was ready for some “b*lls to the wall” action on fixing things. In the end, the only thing we got was a tax cut . . .
What a pain in the butt.
Have you contacted the manufacturer directly? Often they will provide financial assistance if your insurance doesn’t cover it or you bypass insurance
have you looked at Blink Health?
https://www.blinkhealth.com/
It seems like Obama couldn’t get energy prices to actually “skyrocket” like he said – to the San Francisco Chronicle (I think it was) editorial board – would “necessarily” happen under his policies, because there was so much going on, so much freedom, that he couldn’t control. But he tried.
Meanwhile, Biden may outdo him in terms of “skyrocketing” prices via (illegal/unconstitutional) Executive Orders.