Well in a small country there’s not an incentive to raise prices endlessly for medical care. In America there is. So now you have the providers which always want more (don’t misunderstand this, it’s not always the doctor you are seeing that’s commanding a higher price. In fact, it rarely is. It’s the others down the line that want their cut for his work.) and insurers that need to pay for things but can’t just constantly demand more money themselves.

Enter the business majors.

They have decided the insurance companies just need to play chicken with the providers and deny paying for things they deem unreasonable. It does stop some scams, but it also backfires sometimes. So for things like insulin, we don’t have direct control over the price. So we will say “fuck them, if we start paying for insulin X, everyone’s prices go up, not just yours, and we won’t be able to covers everything. Get something more reasonably priced.” It doesn’t matter that insulin X would be perfect for you. Lots of other people need it too, and if we cover it, that money has to come from somewhere and people are financially strapped as is.

Drug companies don’t want to do us any favors. They price insulin like it’s a new fucking iPhone. Luxury insulin. It’s not a new thing. It’s been around forever. It’s settled. But they have the patent and the money to bribe congress critters to prevent regulating prices so here we are.

In other cases, like HIV medication, those drugs are incredibly expensive because they are ridiculously expensive to develop for. The drug company does have to recoup their costs. However they do offer patient assistance programs for a lot of those drugs where THEY will cover your copays. Plus in many countries they aren’t allowed to sell the drug there unless they agree on a reasonable price. And in India, their government said “fuck you” and just outright copied an HIV drug.

Then we get things like GLP-1 inhibitors. Those can be a blessing for diabetics that need them. But as many people as there are that legitimately need it, there are even more that can be sold to for insecurities in appearance and given it as a way to slim down. So guess who the drug companies market to? Demand surges and the price is high because they intentionally created a scarcity like they are selling the next PlayStation. And many insurance companies won’t cover it anymore. And the reason is surprising. Everybody wants this damn thing until they actually get it. Very few actually want to stay on it. They usually vomit constantly on it and they stop taking it. So that’s all that money getting spent on what’s basically TikTok marketing instead of patient care. And then for those that do stay on it, they have to stay on it forever. The longer they take it, the worse they are when they stop. All the weight lost comes back PLUS more. So they end up worse than they started and we paid for that instead of someone’s MRI.

It’s the scarcity that drives up the prices. More money coming in from single payer systems kills the scarcity, and the prices are forced to come down because they have to compete with eachother. But rich people are just business majors with hoarding issues. They always need more. They will never be happy. And they will make us all suffer over their endless persist to bleed the country dry.

We do what we can. This really is the responsibility of a larger entity with more resources than we have, like a fucking government, but they figured out all they have to do keep resources scare to keep us fighting amongst eachother. Add shareholders and you get cartoon villain evil shit like United Health Care. All the while tax dollars go in and do nothing but blame us for trying to make this losing game work.

Imagine your heath insurance just being part of your taxes. You pay them that way. Now imagine that that health insurance tax is less than a third of what you are paying for health insurance now to get better coverage. Thats the absurdity of it. We have a government that doesn’t want to do its job, so business majors swoop in and screw us all.

I hate it here.

It kinda scales. What's the likelihood of 10 million people at once being sick in a country of 10 million? And what's the likelihood in a country of 300 million?