Right, generic drugs are cheap, but you still have to find someone to prescribe it. If you show up in ED without insurance with a hypertensive crisis, they'll give you blood pressure drug doses to resolve/stabilize it, but I don't think they have to give you a prescription to fill. They might charitably do so, but what do you do on Day 29 of that prescription?
The "crazy expensive" part of health care is the long-term chronic conditions: they require a lot of care/tweaking/services over a long period of time. The lifetime costs of treating a diabetic exceeds the lifetime costs of the one-off hip replacement or hip fracture.
I dunno how Trump will create downward pressure on drugs without regulating prices on patented drugs or discouraging/defunding cost-ineffective interventions. That's how most other countries do it, but it seems incompatible with his philosophy.
Perhaps that's the part we really need to fix. I mean at least at the low end of the wealth spectrum it shouldn't cost like three hundred dollars to go to a doctor to prescribe a $10/mo drug. Heart disease is one of the leading causes of death, and it sounds to me like we could get a lot of bang for the buck, statistically speaking, by deregulating this and making prescribing blood pressure meds a "grocery store doctor" thing that doesn't cost much at all. As far as I can tell, the selection of drugs is really narrow for most people. I do agree it's tragic if someone who could be taking care of their hypertension can't do so just because doctors cost so much. I havent heard much about people dying due to lacking access to insulin, though, which leads me to conclude that it can be obtained even by those who don't have the means to pay the full price.
30.3 million people in the US have diabetes. Not all of them need insulin, but even those that do are millions of people, and lots of them are poor. It'd be a major cause of death if they couldn't get insulin. This means they are getting it somehow.
Most Type1 insulin-dependent diabetics start young, so it’s in the manufacturer’s interest to get you on their insulin for free in hopes that you get coverage later in life.
For type 2 diabetics, most are in or will be covered by Part D, so the manufacturers do the same thing.
But for a one-off treatment for those the middle aged, like the new HepC treatments, manufacturers don’t have the same incentives.
The "crazy expensive" part of health care is the long-term chronic conditions: they require a lot of care/tweaking/services over a long period of time. The lifetime costs of treating a diabetic exceeds the lifetime costs of the one-off hip replacement or hip fracture.
I dunno how Trump will create downward pressure on drugs without regulating prices on patented drugs or discouraging/defunding cost-ineffective interventions. That's how most other countries do it, but it seems incompatible with his philosophy.