If they are earning $70,000 per year, why would they be on Obamacare and not get insurance through their employer?
I mean, group insurance via your employer is almost always better - higher quality networks, lower deductibles, etc. All this is because the properties of the group (“healthy working age, often younger people”) is way better than the alternative. Perhaps they are self-employed or only working part time?
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That’s presuming their employer offers health insurance. $70k is two $16/hour jobs. And even if they do offer it, those better networks and lower deductibles still cost a ton relative to ACA plans.
If I had an employer, and that employer offered health insurance, that insurance would be better than what I have now but it’d also be costing me 2-3x what I’m paying now (and that’s only if the employer were subsidizing some of the premium). The out-of-pocket amounts can still be comparable, whether you are paying it in premiums or for treatment. And when you are broke, it’s better to have unpaid debt after treatment than it is to have unpaid premiums before treatment. With the “free” ACA plan you are still covered even when you cant pay your share, with an employer plan you lose all coverage when you dont pay the premium.
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Latest Bidenflation measure - make sure you can stiff your medical provider, which absolutely wont have any impact on the prices they charge. The Admin is trying to ban negative credit reporting for not paying medical bills.
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Maybe they should focus on ensuring patients owe what is being collected? That is an understandable problem, this isnt a solution to that problem.
I thought most providers collect payment upfront? You put your doctor bill on your credit card, and it’s no longer medical debt.
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What is “this” in your assessment? I glanced over the remarks and couldn’t tell exactly what they are proposing, it’s all very vague. Also ensuring that invalid debt can’t be reported IS a solution.
Not hospitals or ER. They just have you sign on the line that you assume responsibility for all payments.
“This” is excluding medical debt from credit reporting. Excluding all medical debt would ensure that invalid debt isnt reported, but it’s not a solution to that problem.
Every year I get billed for tests that are part of the annual wellness visit, because they get coded wrong. Not allowing this $35 to be reported on my credit does not solve this problem, and only serves to give those with legit debts a free pass on the consequences.
Our local hospital does. Of course, there’s the ER’s obligation to provide basic lifesaving care, but beyond that you first need to pay (or at least show the ability to pay).
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In a related story
Supreme Court to review constitutionality of funding consumer protection bureau
Lower courts have split on the issue of whether the CFPB’s funding through annual transfers by the Federal Reserve violates the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause, which establishes Congress’s power of the purse.
The Left is not amused
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Wonder why your taxpayer dollars are paying for treatments that cost $100k’s per patient and probably do nothing?
For life-threatening diseases lacking effective treatments, the patient’s voice is now more important than the quality of the applicant’s evidence
When Sarepta’s elegant placebos were originally approved on very thin data Sarepta were required to produce a confirmatory studies. Sarepta delayed and delayed. You can understand why. They were selling the drug for a lot of money and it did not work. A confirmatory study would expose the scam at the base of this whole store.
Well today a confirmatory study (for a Sarepta drug) came out. And guess what: the drug doesn’t work.
The FDA approves drugs that don’t work. The real purpose of this post is to lay out the conditions for firing the FDA Commissioner Robert Califf.
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Absolutely not! I never wonder. Be sure to get fully vaxxed before having to prevent cardiac issues. 
ETA: The head of neurological research at a major university advised, in the last century, to avoid drugs approved in the last 5 to 10 years. He explained that the intense desire for research dollars turned many heads. Since big pharma no longer needs to publish their research data, I can only imagine what is hidden in basements.
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Nice patent you’ve got there. Shame if anything might happen to it, unless you lower drug prices when we say so.
The White House is throwing its support behind a controversial authority that allows the government to claw back patents for certain high-priced medicines, according to three sources familiar with the plans. It’s an early step that could have major ramifications for the American pharmaceutical industry, depending on whether and how federal officials actually use the authority.
The administration will on Thursday issue a framework for the National Institutes of Health to more broadly use so-called “march-in rights” — a policy that allows it to seize patents from drugmakers whose products rely on federally funded research, according to the three people familiar with the plans. The framework will lay out when the agency might assert this authority, and endorse using a drug’s price in that determination, the sources said.
And then when we don’t get a nice pipeline new drugs, since the R&D costs are no longer justified due to the lower profits and high political risks, I’m sure the answer from those responsible will be that we need more socialism.
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Why not something that is totally legal, ethical, logical, and understandable – require all data (studies, trials, testing, test marketing) from drug development that used federally funded research to be publicly available. I would appreciate this a lot more than allowing whatever administration is in power to shake down (that’s all this is) some company that didn’t donate enough to the “correct” cause, party, or politician.
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It’s not exactly fair if the government gets no benefit from something funded by the government.
Let’s hear your critique on how corporations and universities own all IP created by their employees.
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You could think of that as a subsidy to the biotech industry to encourage drug development, just like tax breaks for oil depletion or ethanol mandates as corn subsidies or whatever. They subsidize all sorts of dumb things, but at least drug development seems somewhat better than average.
If you wanted a more economic and less political-corruption-prone approach to getting more value out of the federal research, they could auction off the future patent rights at the time so the companies who were interested could assess the risks and prospects and have a contract if they want it on terms known at the time. Then if the stuff works out, the company would have to pay some royalties on the drugs when they’re commercialized and the government could use those royalties to lower the cost if they wanted or just recoup their research costs.
The part where Biden butts in just ahead of the election and tells all the drug companies he wants some big headline cuts in insulin or hepatitis treatments to boost his image many years and billions in sunk cost research later after they might have benefited from early stage federal research, well, I can see some issues with that.
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Is it an issue of contract law then? Employees at universities and corporations know what they get into when agreeing to their employment contract. It’s pretty clear cut.
Same if the NIH funds a grant to a faculty who goes on to launch a startup - with the blessing of the university - to commercialize the results of the research for which the grant was obtained.
But it could get murky very quickly if the NIH funds one faculty, and the results are used and extended by another party not funded by the NIH to launch their own startup and commercialize a drug. It’s also not uncommon for labs to have several grants. Say the NIH funds one research but not another. Some research pans out, some doesn’t. Within a research group, money is a bit fungible too. You’ll buy equipment used by all projects in the group from the budget of one grant. Does it mean that if the research group files a patent from a project that did not get NIH funding, they’d still owe the government rights on it?
How far removed from the original grant and direct research results would you allow the government to reach when claiming rights on pharma patents? Discoveries are usually the result of many incremental developments. To prevent overreach, you’d have to draw a pretty strict line between the funding and the result of that funding. Otherwise it looks like a straight money grab and it could have adverse impact on the type of research that gets federally funded.
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Under the current admin, VA treatment takes a back seat to taxpayer funded healthcare for illegal immigrants.
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Are you feeling oppressed? Maybe it’s not your fault that you’re fat, lazy, and eat a bad diet with lots of alcohol. Maybe you’re just a victim of White Oppressive Society and have come down with a bad case of “weathering”.
Like most “research” in Grievance Studies, only correlations are observed and causality is merely asserted, and of course only in the way that furthers the Grievance Narrative. If you measured high IQ vs low IQ cohorts, or rich vs poor cohorts or whatnot, etc, you might accidentally figure out that bad behaviors (or worse, choices!) lead to bad health outcomes rather than the mysterious anti-Black ether emitted by the institutions of high functioning Western societies.
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I cannot decide whether it’s all in the interest of keeping minorities dependent on the white “experts” delivering welfare or simply one more instance of iatrogenics. Maybe both.
It’s all about the fallacy that outputs should be equal regardless of varying inputs. If “2” + “1” doesnt equal “5”, it’s because whitey is oppressing “1” and unfairly holding it back from the same success “3” is allowed to have in that equation. There is no higher agenda, it’s just stupidity and trying to manufacture excuses.
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“we’re from the government, and we’re here to help”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/04/biden-health-care-task-force-inflation-00144713
- WHITE HOUSE TO ANNOUNCE HEALTH CARE COSTS TASK FORCE: POLITICO
Officials from the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Health and Human Services will be on the task force, focused on enforcement, the people familiar with the plans said. The task force is expected to be announced as soon as Tuesday.
Blaming “corporate greed” instead of Bidenflation (trillions printed, rising labor costs, etc), time for some price caps to make sure you have to wait for your healthcare? Obamacare was never about cost control, only “access” and getting people signed up for insurance. Now that they realize it’s expensive, time to grandstand about it to try to look like it wasn’t his fault going into the election.
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