Re:Why Doctors Hate Their Computers (2018)
by yholio on Wednesday September 02, 2020 @06:39AM
(#24351854)
Thanks for the specifics. The drug prices problem has a quite direct solution for single buyer systems: competitive tenders for generics, and QALY price ceilings for patent drugs. If a producer asks for a too high price compared to the health outcome of their drug, the total budget is reassigned among existing drugs, thus forcing all pharmaceutic companies to compete to deliver the best overall healthcare outcome for a given budget.
Too bad the politics in USA prevent this and dismiss it as "death panels", and people are led to believe the hard trade-offs in healthcare can somehow magically go away.
They do something similar with drug prices for Medicare called Average Selling Price (ASP). That system gets gamed as well. In fact, it actually causes prices to rise.
Medicare requires hospitals to report pricing, so they have a decent sense as to what actual costs are. You could create a law saying you have to be within 20% of that price. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it might help.