US has to stem rising drug prices
Re “Donald Trump’s impossible health care dream” (Opinion, April 12): Scot Lehigh correctly notes that health insurance premiums reflect a balance of who and what is covered and who pays for it and that the math can’t be altered “by decree.” That is only partially true. Prescription drugs represent an increasing percentage of health care costs, and it is within the power of Congress and the president to bring some sanity back into that market.
Prescription drug prices no longer have any relationship to costs; rather, they are priced as high as the market will bear. When drug makers jack up the price of EpiPens, insulin, or asthma inhalers long after development costs have been recovered; when Big Pharma colludes with generic drug manufacturers to prevent competition in their markets; when private insurers can negotiate lower drug prices, but Medicare or Medicaid cannot, all of that is reflected in health care premiums.
Practices that artificially inflate prescription drug costs could be addressed if our elected officials had the political will to do so. Other countries regulate drug prices, and US citizens should not have to make up for those lost profit opportunities. Lehigh’s “math” is only a zero sum game so long as taxpayers and health care consumers must fund the pharmaceutical industry’s unlimited, unregulated profits.
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Steven Delaney
Canton
Other countries have found answer (two-word hint: single payer)
Scot Lehigh is right to question the president’s dream for the GOP to become the party of health care (“Donald Trump’s impossible health care dream”). In the current American political context, there is no way the president’s better care and lower costs are possible. However, because the current context is not permanent, Lehigh’s penultimate paragraph is too bleak; it excludes options available in other countries.
European nations with single-payer systems produce better results at significantly lower per capita costs for universal quality health insurance. Just one example: life expectancy. According to a recent study, the United States fell from 43d to 64th in the world; many single-payer European nations have longer life expectancies. To make matters worse, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that life expectancy in the United States is decreasing. This is not happening in single-payer countries.
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John E. Hill
Milton
The writer is a professor emeritus of politics and history at Curry College.
If we learn from what works, we can lower costs and boost care
Scot Lehigh describes a health care plan that is “less expensive and far better” as impossible and reports a former government official describing the possibility as “nonsense.” This is clearly not the case.
In an article some years ago, Atul Gawande described a number of communities that had far lower Medicare costs than the US average. Among these was the area served by the Mayo Clinic, the highest-rated hospital in our country, which has great outcomes, high patient satisfaction, and lower physician stress. In all of these communities, the key difference is the local culture of medical practice, while operating under the same federal Medicare laws and rules. Briefly stated, their culture is more service- and patient-centered and less tilted toward a business practice involving expensive marginal treatments.
We also should consider benchmarking foreign systems for cost and other factors. The best of these are Germany and Switzerland, according to professional evaluations. The latter has a system much like our Affordable Care Act, which provides good results and patient satisfaction at a cost considerably less than ours.
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For many reasons, it would be wise to learn, from these and other sources, ways to steadily reduce our costs and improve practices. The goal is to serve all our people, as we encounter an aging population and increasingly expensive treatments.
Sheldon Buckler
Newton
The writer is a former chairman of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.