The specialty drug Orkambi, for cystic fibrosis, has a sticker price of $259,000 per year. What's driving these astronomical costs for specialty drugs? And can California's budget cope?
Health Insurance and Costs
With the third open enrollment period closing last Sunday and predictions suggesting fewer sign-ups than expected, it’s time to be clear about why it’s so difficult to get the remaining holdouts insured.
“Dollars that were intended for a wide array of medical services started being gobbled up by just one drug,” said Charles Bacchi, president of an industry trade group.
Have we incentivized electronic checkboxes at the expense of more deliberate, thoughtful ways of practicing medicine? Dr. Monya De suggests that today's focus on efficiency and technology leaves little time for actual doctoring.
Jennifer’s experience in Florida’s Medicaid system isn't unique: She waited three months for her son’s appointment and drove 50 miles, only to have the doctor spend five minutes with him, ignore her concerns and tell her to go someplace else.
An unlikely coalition of health insurers, labor and consumer advocates are pushing for controls on high-cost drugs in the nation's most populous state. “California is truly ground zero for this fight,” one advocate said. “It is clear Congress as a whole is not going to take meaningful action."
Malik Stanton is among 2 million children in Florida — about half the state’s under-20 population — who depend on the state’s $24 billion Medicaid program for health care. That same health care system very nearly let him die.
Thousands of babies are born every year in Bexar County, Texas, to mothers who receive no prenatal care. Those women are more likely to give birth prematurely, increasing the odds that their newborns will develop immediate and long-lasting health problems that can be both costly and fatal.
We thought we knew the main reasons why doctors perform too many C-sections in the U.S. But a recently reported study points to another cause: Doctors are often wrong in predicting babies' weight, and that can lead to unnecessary cesareans.
Are insurance policies too complicated to understand? They always have been and always will be unless there are changes in the way policies work, or until there are rules to make it easier for buyers to compare options.