Healthcare USA #1

UPDATE

Children’s Hospital says it’s not appendicitis. He has a stomach virus and essentially a little poop sitting on his appendix that is causing discomfort. Their main concern is for that poop to pass, which they assume it will.

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I picked up a case of cellulitis in my left leg. It started off as fever and headache and chills and by the time I realized i had leg issues I was in alot of pain. This shit is no fun. Went to urgent care and got a antibiotic but nothing for the pain. Nothing stops the pain of any weight on my leg. The only position tolerable is flat on my back with leg elevated. At least the fever seems to be gone. I totally get how people died before antibiotics from infections. Not sure how this got started but I have psoriasis so theres always somewhere aggravated despite being on Humira.

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I have had cellutis before. No fun at all.

That sounds very unpleasant. Hope you can find some relief soon.

I have gained some mobility back today. I can walk a bit and actually use both legs to go up stairs. It is still far from healed and painful.

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not sure where this should go. It’s a very difficult read and Columbia should be made to close its doors given what’s here.

Well, after all that, it turns out my kid has hand foot mouth disease. Sure hope nobody else in my house gets it (I’m sure it’s too late at this point, if we’re going to catch it, we’ve caught it already).

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Eliquis is the costliest of the 10 drugs for Medicare Part D. From June 2022 to May 2023, the program’s gross coverage costs for Eliquis reached $16.5 billion to supply the drug to 3.7 million enrollees. In 2022, out-of-pocket costs per enrollee averaged $441. Bristol Meyers Squibb and partner Pfizer have ratcheted up the drug’s price considerably since it entered the market in 2021. An analysis by AARP earlier this year found that Eliquis’ list price increased by 124 percent between 2012 and 2021, while inflation during that time was 31 percent.

If the drug makers reject the negotiations, they would either face an excise tax of up to 95 percent of the drugs’ sales, or have to pull all of their drugs from the Medicare and Medicaid markets.

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Eliqius / Xarelto seems seems like an area where competitive forces should work better because there are two very similar products, somehow they’re both in the top 3. Regardless, Xarelto will go off patent in less than a year and there should be generics soon after considering the size of the market.

Another trip to the dentist to fix a filling. In and out in less than 15 minutes. Better than sex!

The tally: $12 US.

And in over a dozen trips to this dentist, I’ve never once been called a minute later than my reservation time.

Whereas in a lifetime of trips to the dentist back in 'Merica, I can’t recall ever being called on time even once.

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If you need another reason to get riled up in todays world. Shingles > tuberculosis.

There really is an externality problem with the whole medicine for profit pipeline. Individual companies might not benefit from curing something but the national or worldwide utility would go up. The really need some kind of hand off mechanism where the company says, this can be cured but we’re not going to make money off of it and the government takes over and writes a check for the work done. I know that creates a selection problem with companies handing off the least profitable stuff while making bank on the profitable stuff but it’d be better overall. At least maybe?

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The company told ProPublica that it cannot do everything, and it now sees its role in global health as doing early development of products and then handing off the final clinical trials and manufacturing to others. It also said that a vaccine for TB is radically different from the company’s other vaccines because it can’t be sold at scale in wealthy countries.

Though a good TB vaccine would be used by tens of millions of people, it has, in the parlance of industry, “no market,” because those who buy it are mostly nonprofits and countries that can’t afford to spend much. It’s not that a TB vaccine couldn’t be profitable. It’s that it would never be as profitable as a product like the shingles vaccine that can be sold in the U.S. or Western Europe.

It’s all gross. I want capitalists to defend this.

I’ve never heard a real good defense of this kind of stuff from a theoretical standpoint. Capitalism and markets are supposed to work because of revealed preferences. People “bid” towards things they really want by spending money and so society shifts resources to fulfill those preferences and the end result is that overall utility goes up.

But that mechanism depends on the assumption of underlying equality. If you have a very unequal society then the money spent = utility breaks down. Bill Gates can spent what amounts to nothing to him to capture a resources that perhaps a poor family desperately needs. The example I had seen was a family who lives in poverty needs an Uber to get a family member to the hospital or they might die and Bill Gates wants to get an ice cream cone. Who is going to bid the most to get the Uber?

You have the same problem here where it’s self evident that curing tuberculous, a disease that kills people, would be more beneficial than curing a painful rash, but it’s is deemed less beneficial because the people who have a painful rash have more money and can “outbid” the people who would die.

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Super confused by this. A vaccine against Tb has existed since the 1920s and is still in common use today. Like 100 million children per year get it common use.

Sure talk about market forces and yada yada, but make a mistake like this in the header and I’m not exactly trusting your capability to write well on this subject.

It mentions it in the article. The header is ambiguous. It’s talking about a new vaccine that’s more effective.

https://twitter.com/jesuslasupajew/status/1712988821510398417?t=V5ZJaf7JZe1-q68bMc0x3w&s=19

Price of freedom bro.

Laboratory putting in work!

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