Humira’s Drug Formula: Start at a High Price, Go Higher

Re:Humira’s Drug Formula: Start at a High Price, Go Higher by kgwgk on Monday January 08, 2018 @09:03AM (#16096744)

More than 90% of the patients with end-stage renal disease are covered by Medicare (regardless of age).

“Perhaps no other Federal Government program can lay claim to have saved as many lives as the Medicare end stage renal disease (ESRD) program.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4194691/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Humira’s Drug Formula: Start at a High Price, Go Higher by kgwgk on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @08:32AM (#16105977)

I wonder what’s the reason for the downvotes. This was a purely factual comment directly addressing the parent’s point of “quite possibly [being] dead if [he or she] lived in the US”.

Kidney failure is in fact the best example of the US government stepping in to provide universal coverage for a life saving treatment (even though it requires copays, but there are also patient assistance programs to help with that; see below).

A different question is that the system has many issues, see for example [0] and the recent figth between private insurers and dialysis clinics due to the assistance provided by charities which are funded by the dialysis companies that help patients to pay for commercial insurance (reimbursement from private payors is much higher, even though most patients are on Medicare they are not profitable).

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/in-dialysis-life-saving-c... [2] https://www.barrons.com/articles/insurers-press-dialysis-cla...

[ Parent | on HN ]