I'm lucky: for someone my age I take remarkably few medications. However, there are a couple that I can't afford to take for the full year because of the "doughnut hole" in Medicare Part D: They're just too expensive for that last month or two. Hence, I was very interested in this article by Gaius Publius at Hullabaloo:
Read the whole thing; it's a fairly detailed and very clear set of ways to rein in not only drug prices but some other bad effects of Republican economic policies that don't rely on congressional action: they're all within the scope of existing law.
Along with many others, we recently wrote about Mylan's predatory price increases on the life-saving prescription drug product EpiPen. Then came the news that the interestingly named Valeant had increased the price of a prescription drug it had purchased, not developed, more than 2700%, apparently anticipating a growing lead poisoning crisis like the one in Flint, Michigan. ("Did your kids get sick from eating lead paint? We'll fix them right up ... for $27,000.")
At the end of the Valeant piece, I added a section that argued for an industry-wide — and Executive Branch-only — fix. Don't play Whack-a-Mole with individual companies, I argued. Whack drug prices industry-wide, or we'll always be chasing a shadow and fixing problems only when they're reported as scandals.
High prescription prices are an industry problem, not a problem of "outliers" (source; click to enlarge)
It turns out that Rep. Mark Pocan and a number of his colleagues have the same idea. From a letter Pocan wrote, and dozens of his colleagues signed, here are three specific suggestions that the next president can unilaterally enact, whoever she or he may be.
Read the whole thing; it's a fairly detailed and very clear set of ways to rein in not only drug prices but some other bad effects of Republican economic policies that don't rely on congressional action: they're all within the scope of existing law.
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