
The true story of America’s sky-high prescription drug prices - paulpauper
http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/11/30/12945756/prescription-drug-prices-explained
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a3n
In the health care market in the US, if you have insurance then your insurance
company negotiates drug prices that it will pay. As an insurance customer, you
get the lower price, paid partly by your copay and partly by all customers'
premiums.

If you don't have health insurance, then you pay the whole price for the drug,
and that price itself is higher than the prices that insurance companies pay,
because you as an individual have no bargaining power, other than to not buy
the drug and die.

As a country, the US has made itself the customer with no insurance,
prohibiting ourselves from negotiating a more bearable price.

The article mentions the argument that without high drug prices there would be
no incentive to develop a drug at all. And yet, drug companies happily
negotiate with and sell to other countries that require negotiation to even
enter the market.

I say this over and over: US consumers live in the consumers' paradise of the
US, in a similar way that cows live in the beef paradise of Argentina.

