Conference on Drug Pricing Inject New Statistics Into Debate, Few New Insights (Part 2 of 2)
The first part of this article described the upward pressures on costs and some of the philosophical debates over remedies. This section continues the discussion with several different angles on costs.
Universal access and innovation
It’s easy to call health care a human right. But consider an analogy: housing could also be considered a human right, yet no one has the right to a twenty-room mansion. Modern drug and genetic research are creating the equivalents of many twenty-room mansions, and taking up residence means the difference between life and death for someone, or perhaps between a long productive life and one of pain and deformity.
Universal access, often through a single-payer system, is in widespread use in every developed country except the United States. Both universal access and single payer are credited with keeping down the costs of health care, including drugs. It makes sense to link single-payer with lower drug costs, because of the basic rules of economics: size gives a buyer clout, as we can see in the ways Walmart lords it over their suppliers (documented in a 2006 book, The Wal-Mart Effect, by Charles Fishman). At the conference, Sean Dickson from the Pew Charitable Trusts gave what he called an “economics 101 course” of health care and how the industry diverges from an ideal market. (He did not come out in favor of single-payer, though.)
How much fat can be cut from pharma? My guess is a lot. As we saw in the previous section, profits ...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Andy Oram Tags: Healthcare Reform Medical Economics Personalized Medicine Precision Medicine Drug Pricing Healthcare Costs Medication Pricing Source Type: blogs
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