Corporate Welfare Comes in Different Flavors

Tad DeHaven An issue with my paper on corporate welfare in the federal budget is that cases can be made for other expenditures not on the list. A prime example would be Pentagon weapons procurement. I’ll simply say that deciding what counts and what doesn’t is complicated.  The New York Times has another example of what could be considered a form of corporate welfare: excessive federal reimbursement rates for anti-anemia drugs used by dialysis centers. This snippet provides the background:  The multibillion-dollar dialysis industry has been accused  by medical researchers and former employees of putting a higher priority on profits than on care before, giving patients for many years too many doses of the expensive anti-anemia drug Epogen to collect higher reimbursements — allegations the companies have strongly disputed.  The excessive payments to the companies since 2011 came about, in fact, as the federal government tried to create a single bundled payment for each patient visit. The idea was to eliminate the incentive to prescribe too many doses of Epogen, which medical research showed was harming patients.  With the profit incentive gone, use of Epogen dropped even more than the federal government expected. So the amount of money set aside in the new bundle exceeded the cost of the drugs, two separate federal audits in the last year have shown.  The industry, as a result, has collected an extra $530 million to $880 million a year in fe...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Source Type: blogs