Yves Smith - Stealth Plan to Shift Costs of Certain Widely-Used Drugs to Consumers

The US healthcare system is wildly overpriced and delivers mediocre outcomes. And while the many of the problems are well known, such as bad incentives for doctors, patients trained to equate over-testing and over-treatment with high quality care, high administration costs, and unrestricted drug pricing (despite lavish public funding of drug research), Obamacare has sided with industry incumbents, namely Big Pharma and health care insurers, at the expense of everyone else.

We predicted that one outcome would be overpriced insurance that didn’t cover much (note for middle class and affluent consumers, it would probably be better to have only catastrophic coverage and self insure for the rest; the worst is pricey insurance that leaves you carrying meaningful costs, particularly for major medical procedures). We seem to be moving in that direction already.

Reader bob alerted me to a news item that also seems to have gone below the radar of most finance and economics bloggers: that of an FDA proposal to have more drugs available on an over-the-counter basis, including ones for diabetes (insulin), high cholesterol, allergies, and migraines.

Read More:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/stealth-plan-to-shift-costs-of-certain-widely-used-drugs-to-consumers.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29