Pharmacy

The Secret Back Door

4 Comments / American Medicine, Health Care - How it's Broken

Go to a typical primary care practice (like the one I was in for 18 years) and try to find out the cost of anything and you will only get shrugs and obfuscation.  It’s not only that they don’t know what things cost, but the design of the system on which care is built goes out of its way to hide those costs.  Why?  Because it would be infuriating to people to see that their insurance pays 100% more than someone else’s plan and it would be equally mortifying to some physicians to realize just how bad their pay is compared to the docs down the hall.

Of Drugs and Rectal Pain

6 Comments / Health Care - How it's Broken

Fortunately for this my patient, I was not only able to reunite him with the joys of sitting, but I was able, with a little research, to find him his proctological savior at a low cost.  Unfortunately, most patients don\’t have docs who are economically incentivized to save them money, and most people don\’t realize all of the games played by pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies to routinely perform wallet biopsies, nor do they know how to find the cheapest prices for their medications.

I don\’t know what can be done about this kind of thing aside from increasing awareness. I\’m not real confident in any government solution.  People just need to be smarter shoppers when it comes to their care.  It\’s just a shame that people who are dealing with health problems (even if it is just trouble sitting) have to outsmart the gaming done by those supposedly trying to help them.