The healthcare system is broken, and any aspect you look at will give you insight into how systemically broken the whole American model is.
Take pills. Medications. Pharmaceuticals.
Bringing new medications on line costs billions in research and clinical trials, and sometimes those investments go bust with no benefit to the manufacturer. They pocket a loss. Or, more often, innovations in science and chemistry lead to a potential to improve health outcomes, and the system is built to recoup the investment, and reward the investors who made the exploration possible. With no backstops to mitigate the system, the profits are obscene.
Novo Nordisks's Ozempic, one of the hottest new medications introduced recently, is a perfect example. Where American's pay $12,000 for the medication, Canadians pay $2,000. Many new medications in America cost over a million dollars. What's the problem?
"Well that's a fairly easy one. Other nations negotiate prices with drug manufacturers, because in most country's there is one or a small number of buyers. Here in the U.S., there's not really anything like that," says Dr. Jeffrey Sherer, Clinical Professor in the Department of Pharmacy Practice and Translational Research at the University of Houston. Medicare negotiates some drug prices: insulin the first to come to mind. But that's a sliver of a fraction of a kind of medications available. In Europe, government decide what prices will be. In the U.S., the drug companies decide what prices will be. It's pretty clear which system gives Big Pharma the upper hand.
Americans spend more on medications than people in any other country. We spend an average of $1,300 per year on medications per person per year, based on 2022 numbers
"There was a period of about twenty years when pharmaceuticals were the most profitable industry in the country, and so you can make this argument that if they make these profits each year is it really as risky an endeavor as they sometimes try to make it out to be," Sherer adds.
They have us by the proverbial throat, and we pay the piper or we suffer the consequences as the US continues to try coming to grips with a health care industry more concerned with their ability to thrive than yours.
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