Quote:FIrst, you don't know the cost of the pill to make that assumption, you're basing it on your out of pocket cost at the pharmacy. Last week I had a treatment where the medication cost over $6,000. You assume that the cost is less than a penny and that skews your entire perception. Going to a hospital is going to a billion dollar facility staffed by professionals who are very expensive to retain. The cost of everything is calculated into the price of the services and products rendered there and someone has to pay for it. 

 

And your repeated complaint about mark up is really something you should complain about in every industry. Ever bought popcorn at the movies? How about a cup of coffee at Starbucks? The mark up on those is in the thousands of percentage points. To just assume that health care shouldn't do the same thing is to assume that they can stay in business with no margin. The pizza metaphor is the difference between you picking up Domino's and you going to a 5 star restaurant for dinner and ordering pizza. The pizza won't be the same price because the delivery mechanism is different (you'll even pay more to tip the server!), even if the quality is the same. $5 at Domino's vs $40 at the 5 star = 700% markup entirely based on WHERE you got the pizza. The same thing happens when you go to the ER for care, and it applies to every service, not just the meds, because the delivery mechanism is outrageously expensive.

 

And as for access to services? Yes, you can create a private healthcare facility, they exist all over the country.There's also concierge medicine where you pay for a membership to have exclusive access to your doctor. 24 hour access and house calls, no office appointments needed, you have his phone number and can call whenever you want. Those are both free market solutions to the "health care problem" that are working. And you could turn your neighborhood tavern into a healthcare facility if the state didn't forbid it. Why do they forbid it? Because they can. Why don't we have more hospitals? Because the process to get a permit to build one takes years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and sometimes a lawsuit so a judge can decide who gets to build it. But again, those are levels of complexity added by the over-regulation of the industry that drive up the costs. Just because we DON'T have free market healthcare doesn't me we COULDN'T have it.

I can assume that when a 30 day supply of pills is less than $12 as a prescription, they are not paying $2.5 per pill... It would be far less...It's not terribly hard to do a simple google search and find that the majority of pills such as moderate pain pills are sold to hospitals for pennies or fraction of pennies...I did not get an exact quote no, but I did find the part that I just said...

 

Everything you buy is marked up but not thousands of percent...Here I'll sell you a 2008 silverado with only 57K miles on it. I paid $22k for it but I'll sell it to you for $125,000...You would be ok with used car sales mark ups such as that from dealers? Didn't think so...There comes a point in time when things are marked up TOO much...Every business is trying to make as much money as possible but when it comes to marking products up for resale, there comes a point when the huge markup just becomes nothing but pure greed and there is really no defense for it...

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