TL;DR Profiteering. There's a book by E. Fuller Torrey about managing schizophrenia. In it, he makes the observation that as of 2006, it is cheaper to buy a 1st class ticket from New York to Spain, stay at a 5 star in Madrid for a week and buy a year's worth of meds there than it is to buy your antipsychotics on the US market.
A friend of mine suffered an injury that required surgery. He had recently spent time in Croatia, and did the math to figure out that it was cheaper to buy a round-trip ticket to Croatia and have the surgery done there as opposed to having it done in the United States.
As someone who's always had health insurance, I have absolutely no idea how receiving healthcare works for someone who isn't insured. Do you mind explaining what you did during those 6 years whenever you got sick or needed treatment? EDIT: Also, did not having insurance have an effect on how you lived your life in terms of taking risks and having fun?
Well, - You don't go to the dentist. - You don't go to the optometrist. - You don't go to the emergency room. - You don't get sick. - You make sure you've got personal injury protection on your motorcycle and automobile insurance. I still bought a longboard. I still rode a motorcycle. But yeah - when the fucking clown shoot put a rusty nail through my arm, I made damn sure production paid for the tetanus shot.
For me, one of the best things about having decent state healthcare is that it introduces true competition (both in terms of price and quality) within the private healthcare market. While you would be paying twice to have private healthcare, as your taxes are already covering state healthcare, I still much prefer this system. However, it does not stop the drugs companies from overcharging both the state and private healthcare providers.
At his hospital, he reported at a medical meeting this month, 18 of 30 babies were successfully treated with two weeks’ worth of a high-dose oral steroid. Only the 12 who did not respond were switched to Acthar, with five of them successfully treated. Given that the steroids cost $200 for each baby, compared with about $125,000 for Acthar, the approach saved more than $2 million. “We have to look at the cost to the health care system,” Dr. Hussain said. I feel weird saying it, but this guy, and others like him, are going to be the heroes of modern-day medicine for the next few decades. Doctors have their practice fairly well down, but the costs of the system are wildly unchecked and in need of improvement. This is legal? I thought pharmaceutical companies had to completely characterize and report all substances contained in their drug?Dr. Shaun Hussain of Mattel Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles said that the studies showing Acthar to be better than far cheaper steroids used too low a dose of steroids.
Yet Questcor is now arguing that its studies show that Acthar, despite the “highly purified” in its name, actually contains other substances from the pig pituitary glands that account for some of its effectiveness. The company does not intend to say what those other ingredients are, thus making it extremely hard for a generic company to copy Acthar.