Today, Type 1 diabetes patients pay twice as much for insulin as they did in 2012. This is outrageous — but drug companies aren’t to blame. The problem is a dysfunctional supply chain that benefits everyone except patients.
In today’s system, insurers hire third-party firms, known as pharmacy benefit managers, to manage drug plans. These PBMs negotiate with drugmakers and have the power to decide which drugs are covered by each plan. Each year, manufacturers dole out $150 billion in rebates and discounts as a result of these negotiations. But patients rarely see these savings at the pharmacy counter.
The Democratic Party’s presidential hopefuls are diverse in all ways but one — their stance on healthcare reform. The front-runners want to eliminate private insurance and put everyone on a government-run plan.
But that’s not something they’ve been enthusiastic about revealing to voters. Senator Elizabeth Warren recently refused to say whether she would support a single-payer plan that eliminated private health insurance.
A new report from government actuaries has revealed that the Congressional Budget Office was scandalously off in its estimates of the impact of Obamacare’s individual mandate, a miscalculation that has had significant ramifications for healthcare and tax policy over the past decade.
After health care sharply divided Democratic and Republican candidates in last fall’s campaigns, Florida lawmakers are considering wide-ranging changes to what a GOP leader derides as the “hospital-industrial complex.”
Ideas on the table in Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature steer clear of demands for universal health care or Medicaid expansion, advanced by federal and state Democratic contenders during the November elections.
States that expanded their Medicaid health insurance programs are hunting for ways to fund the new enrollees in 2020 as they face a final drop in federal contributions.
The federal government will still cover the bulk of the costs of care for the roughly 13 million Americans newly eligible for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which allowed states to expand the program to people earning somewhat above the federal poverty level. But the gradually decreasing federal contribution — originally set at 100 percent but reduced to 90 percent starting next year — has left some states with budget holes to fill.