
A look at people who have persistently high spending on health care - howard941
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/a-look-at-people-who-have-persistently-high-spending-on-health-care/
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coderintherye
Some of this analysis may seem obvious, but it's really interesting to see how
much prescription drug spending plays a role. Could a reason that U.S.
healthcare spending is higher on average than other countries be partially due
to us essentially subsidizing new drug development? It sort of leads into a
question of how effective is our prescription drug spending?

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howard941
The pharmaceutical industry would have us believe the cost driver is R&D and
the money well spent. Aside from patent regreening and out of control
marketing [0] I think the change in pricing methodology from cost-plus to
value-based [1] explains most all of the delta.

[0] Advertising chemotherapeutic agents directly to the consumer ought to be
disallowed as an expense under the tax code, IMO

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-
based_pricing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-based_pricing)

Copyedited.

