I am completely on board that it shouldn’t be. If they want to give the doctor free clipboards and other de minimus swag, fine. But the cash bribes should absolutely be illegal.
Did I mention the rebates totaled nine figures? I’m not talking about a small amount of money.
That sounds like a patent that shouldn’t have been approved. (And my understanding is that this sort of BS is common.)
Well even that beats no choice.
But if you’re arguing that we should divorce healthcare from employment and ALL go into the individual market then I won’t disagree.
In theory I think that’s the correct way it should be. In practice I recognize that getting there from here would be pretty disruptive. (Thanks FDR.)
Ok, so [old drug + prednisone] is patent-protected but [old drug without prednisone] should not be at that point.
Yes, fixing the patent process would be a good change.
I get it and am in agreement.
Single payer doesn’t address that problem.
But it should absolutely be addressed.
Yeah, this is a different rabbit hole. As someone who worked on the provider side and dealt with $$$ drugs, I have strong opinions on this one. On the flip side, while it’s fun to shit on pharma (see above), we do need them.
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I very seriously looked at the black market/Silk Road (is that still a thing?) in order to get my drugs from India for a fraction of the price.
Nowadays that’s not reasonable since the new drugs are IV-administered, not just a pill, but I very sincerely was thinking about illegally importing them for a while.
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By the way, I do appreciate your willingness to acknowledge the problems and seek to move forward.
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My first choice would, indeed, be to divorce healthcare from employment and have a highly-regulated individual market. My second choice would be single-payer. What we have is far worse than either of those, imho.
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My mom imported one of her drugs from India. She initially got a prescription from a Canadian pharmacy, and when it was time to refill it, the refill came directly from India.
She was taking a cortisone-like drug that had been approved in every country EXCEPT the US, that her doctor recommended as she was having side effects from the cortisone. (By “every country”, I mean it was approved in the UK, the EU, India, Israel, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. Dunno about anything else.) It was cheap, too.
Until it got approved in the US. Then it became illegal to import it (there’s a weird loophole for individual use if the drug is neither approved nor outlawed in the US) but the US price was about 200 times higher than what she’d been paying. Like, at her annual visit to the specialist who prescribed it, he said, “I have some bad news… but maybe you can keep importing it anyway.”
We continued buying it from India.
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Yes, we need them and it’s fine for them to be profitable. But there are certain abusive practices that need to stop. I think we’re in agreement.
Is it illegal to vacation in India and bring drugs back with you? I honestly don’t know. Seems like it shouldn’t be.
Well we have the same first choice then, even if we disagree about much of the rest.
I haven’t really thought through it all, but I am currently thinking that something in the direction of MA for all might be a sweet spot. Allow for choice, have ACA-like regulations on what must be covered by all plans. I haven’t thought through subsidies much but I’d include them in some fashion. Put a cap on underwriting, maybe a little higher and with more flexibility than ACA allows. But, I don’t know, I wouldn’t allow for a $10k monthly premium or whatever.
There are limits to how much you can bring in, but in general, no, it’s legal to carry your own stash of meds with you.
Once, when my employer’s choice of drug provider wouldn’t approve the omeprazole I needed (I was taking more than one a day, and they have a mechanism to approve that, but it’s cumbersome and takes a lot of the doctor’s time, and it just wasn’t working…) my boss’s wife brought me a few months worth of omeprazole when she returned from vacationing in India. I asked my boss if she needed a prescription or anything, and he just laughed.
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Well I need to plan my next beach vacation for Mexico so I can get some hydrocodone. That’s another problem that exists that single-payer won’t solve.
How do I find out what the limits are on what I can bring back? And is it different for a narcotic than a GI med?
Yes, if they happen to look at your drugs (they usually don’t) you need a prescription to be carrying opioids.
Customs doesn’t really care, in general, however.
You could potentially get into trouble at the customs if they find it and you start acting nervous and sketchy.
If you don’t know how to lie correctly when you get busted, it’s better to go to a foreign country, buy the drugs, and mail it back to you in the US. Packages are only searched randomly, so there’s a good chance they make it through. Diversify your risk and send multiple packages if you want to.
This is how most people get drugs through (prescription, recreational, steroids, etc.)
Hmmm, ok. Does a prescription from a Mexican doctor count? The whole problem is that American doctors are terrified of prescribing narcotics.
Or is “prescription from a Mexican doctor” not even a thing because it’s OTC in Mexico?
Maybe I need to be planning a Niagara Falls vacation to Canada instead.