Until Medicare Part D forces insurers to keep the same formulary for the entire year that it forces the purchaser to sign up for this scam will continue to be popular with the Insurance industry
The simplest way to lower drug costs would be to ban television advertising of medication. Stop promoting the generalized, unrealistic expectation of a pill for everything!
Fu*k you and the horse that drug you in ,dotard drumpf…lying cheating old sot.
4th grade bully demented crook do nothing know nothing cesspool dweller.
At some age a person gets all the stuff they want and becomes a bad consumer unit. Your money or your life becomes a useful tool to rehabilitate the renegade non-consumer unit. People routinely pay a million bucks or more per Gram of the active ingredient in the medications they need to sustain themselves. The pharmaceutical company owners do not negotiate that price, and in fact use some of the excess profits to jack market share.
Enter stage right one known as Dances with Skanks to propose fixing the cost of medications by giving up a bit of the kick back. It sounds nice but Don the Con never lets a mark get the dangle. Congress will see to that. The pharmaceutical and insurance companies and middlemen are adept at shuffling this Three Card Monte scam.
"Pharmaceutical companies now pay REBATES to insurers and pharmacy benefit managers to help their medications gain a bigger slice of the market."
Um, no. They are called BRIBES. Not REBATES.
This trial balloon will go exactly nowhere when the Pharmaceutical Lobby reves up to stop it in Congress.
This is a blatant attempt to PURCHASE VOTES for the 2018 midterms from their Elderly supporters who are beginning to wake up to what a disaster the Trump/Republican cabal truly is for America.
I guess somebody is running out of Viagra.
LOL AP and the stupid conventions of Washington political reporting. “The drug industry lobby had no immediate reaction” to its hirelings on Capitol Hill and in the White House passing legislation that it largely wrote.
So this move, which is stupid in the first place, would still prevent medicare from negotiating directly with pharma companies and distributors to get lower prices. And would require senior citizens instead to keep track of what deals were available when. Uh-huh.
has the feel of pandering to seniors in an election year
GOTV
So, it’s still fine to fuck over the middle class working folks. I’ll remember that come November.
Insurers and pharmacy benefit managers say the reason drug costs are so high is that drug companies are free to charge what the market will bear.
As is so ably demonstrated across the northern border in Canada. So long as we have a Congress bought and paid for by wealthy corporate donors, nothing will change. And special thanks to John Roberts and his fellow “conservatives” on the Supreme Court for the “Citizens United” decision.
This does nothing to reduce costs to seniors. It simply results in cost shifting. If some rebates are passed along to select consumers, Part D premiums will go up for everyone to continue to reward insurers. The only way to reduce prices is to demand price bargaining similar to what almost every other in the world does. I have lived in the southwest and the northwest and treks to Mexico and Canada for prescriptions are routine for seniors because prices are so much lower. What Americans pay for drugs compared to other countries is a crime.