Every drug company gives away their drugs for free to people who can't afford it in the US. It's sad that not enough people take advantage of patient assistance programs.
You are correct that companies do have patient assistance programs. What you’re leaving out is that this applies to a small subset of people that usually have to be denied federal/state insurance, not have any other kind of insurance, and make less than 4x federal poverty level.
additionally, they rarely provide a lifelong supply. Imagine being a diabetic and novo nordisk, who makes most of the insulin types on the market, only gives you a four month supply.
Oh wait, thats exactly the terms of their patient assistance program.
Just a W-2 or a federal tax return should do - not like those poor people should care about their data or privacy or dignity or anything ~s
Gilead would reimburse any out of pocket costs.
Even still it's just a sick game to bilk insurance companies, and thus us insurance premium payers, out of more money while pretending to be looking out for consumers. The monthly cost on my really great insurance was still over $1k out of pocket, which took a bunch of paper work and over a month to get back. Poor people don't have that luxury.
Oh and now that Gilead's license has run out they have a new very expensive PrEP drug magically appear. Which they tout doesn't have as bad long term downside on your organs. The skeptic in me seems to think the timing is too perfect. if there is a safer drug throw it out asap. maybe they did, I can't know that but I have a strong distaste for Gilead in particular.
For-profit healthcare is one of the biggest moral failings of our country.
These discount programs aren't some big secret people don't know about. I see that argument thrown out in defense of high prices but it simply isn't true. Every doctor prescribing drugs knows about them and tells their patients about them. If people are going without necessary medication because they don't know about a discount program then they are extreme outliers.
These discount programs are simply marketing & lobbying tools used to give politicians cover when they all continue to ignore meaningful healthcare reform.
Not to mention that services like foodstamps can be unreliable… I’ve probably spent hours of my life holding up checkout lines because my card didn’t process…
not having money is one thing, but being poor also obliterates your time if you use various services…which in my experience is worse… you’re always tired and agitated. Someone is always messing up your paperwork, because of course civil servants are often underpaid and overworked themselves.
Looking back they were probably just overworked and exhausted, but man.
People blame bureaucracy, and maybe there’s some truth there, but if these people were treated half as well as many tech workers are then maybe we could actually start making progress against the stereotype of miserable experiences.
Nobody who has drive and wants to get shit done lasts very long in that environment. There are occasional pockets of "good" but they don't last because when they accomplish too much people move up and out or they get reigned in by the rest of the system.
Source: members of my household work in government providing social services.
Better known by the people who actually work there as, "Shoving a bunch of people and papers around to show you're changing things, with no plan, strategy, or even background information to support a single thing."
If you think alternating parties solves the problems, you have another think coming your way!
Because for a customer who would pay nothing if their only choice was to get the drug at full price, settling for a reduced price (especially when you also get a tax deduction, and some PR benefit from advertising the discount for the needy) is more profitable than not settling.
I don't believe this is universally true though. For example, patent-encumbered novel delivery mechanisms for existing (generic) drugs, like Concerta. The drug company has nothing to gain by maintaining the administrative infrastructure for patient-assistance for drugs like that.
Another example are personalised therpaies, such as immunotherapy treatments - which cost so much because (as I understand it, please correct me if I'm wrong) they require individual experts to develop the personalized antibodies and whatnot - unlike with mass-produced medication pills/tablets/capsules that have negligible marginal cost: a company isn't going to give away a $100k therapeutic drug for free because it still is going to cost them $50k+ (numbers just made up btw).
No, they don’t all provide their drugs for free, but most of them offer directly or fund assistance programs that provide either free or reduced cost drugs.
I kind of figured all of the dead diabetics in the US that I’ve read about over the years was the result of a structural problem with our healthcare system. Apparently this is maybe an issue with suboptimal Google AdSense campaigns that led to fewer diabetics knowing about the font of free insulin?
What a revelation that the manufacturers that control the pricing of this life-saving drug (and apparently all other drugs) are actually blameless in every scenario and that anybody that rations and/or dies does so to themselves due to being dumb.
The comment that I’m responding to strikes me as either alarmingly uninformed about the material conditions that many, many diabetics find themselves in, naïveté based around completely believing some marketing pamphlet, or genuinely making statements in bad faith. I chose to respond in a sarcastic way in my previous comment because the nature of that statement is so incredibly outlandish and broad that it genuinely seems like a comment in bad faith.
“All pharmaceuticals are free if you just go to the website” is genuinely such a dada-esque-ly untrue statements for the majority of Americans that I can only imagine a person making that statement as a joke or a lie.
This is the worst exploitation and gaming.
1% get the freebies. And 99% get to pay a price that’s 10x the sticker cost.
That’s a rip-off and a complete burden to insurance and tax payers.