Our Allies Have Become Our Enemies (Restoring Care to American Healthcare Book 1) by Dr. Deane Waldman MD MBA

Author:Dr. Deane Waldman MD MBA [Waldman MD MBA, Dr. Deane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: ADM Books
Published: 2016-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Her treatment was repeated five more times over the next four months. The total charge for pharmaceuticals alone was $74,378.16. Her insurance paid $53,585.40 to the pharmacy that sells the drugs. My friend has excellent insurance; her husband owns an insurance company! Even so, she is expected to pay out of pocket $20,792.76 just for her chemotherapy drugs alone. This does not include doctor’s fees or co-payments for the hospitalizations needed to handle the well-described and all-too-frequent complications of the drugs.

I am very pleased to say that my friend beat the big “C.”

No doubt you feel sick to your stomach looking at the price tag. Maybe you wouldn’t be quite so outraged if this were a complex heart valve replacement operation, but more than $74,000 for a bunch of cancer drugs?! Never mind how much it costs to research and manufacture drugs. Two years’ wages for a handful of pills seems exorbitant.

Let’s stop a minute and realize that, just like heart surgery, those drugs saved my neighbor’s life. How much is her life worth? Would you say $400,000 but not $500,000? Worth how much to whom? How do you measure the value of a life? Who should measure it?

If you are looking here for your answers, they are not here. No one person should answer these questions for another. Most definitely, these are questions the government should not answer for you. Only you can and should answer these questions for you.

I can answer the original question: is Big Pharma our ally or our enemy? Under the current system, with the perverse incentives that are described in the next chapter, pharmaceutical manufacturers are certainly ... not our friends.

Do not succumb to playing the blame game. It is not the fault of the individual doctor or hospital, nor the insurance company with a familiar name, nor even the wealthy pharmaceutical multinational. It is not their fault that they are our enemies. They are trying to keep up with the radical changes that have occurred in the American healthcare system, changes that will be described in the next chapter.

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