JAMA – In the mosaic floor of the opulent atrium of a house excavated at Pompeii is a slogan ironic for being buried under 16 feet of volcanic ash: Salve Lucrum, it reads, “Hail, Profit.”
That mosaic would be a fitting decoration today in many of health care’s atria.
The grip of financial self-interest in US health care is becoming a stranglehold, with dangerous and pervasive consequences.
No sector of US health care is immune from the immoderate pursuit of profit, neither drug companies, nor insurers, nor hospitals, nor investors, nor physician practices.
Rapidly increasing pharmaceutical costs are now familiar to the public.
“A patient was billed $73,800 at the University of Chicago for 2 injections of Lupron depot, a treatment for prostate cancer, a drug available in the UK for $260 a dose.”
Pharmaceutical companies have used monopoly ownership of medications to raise prices to stratospheric levels, and not just for new drugs.
Flaws in US patent laws leave loopholes allowing profiteering drug companies to gain control of some simple and long-known medications and to raise prices without constraint.
Eye-popping prices for new, essential biological and biosimilar drugs, enabled by the failure of any serious drug price regulation, have yielded enormous profits for drug companies even though much of the basic biological research funding has come from governmental sources.
Particularly costly has been profiteering among insurance companies participating in the Medicare Advantage (MA) program.
Originally intended to give Medicare beneficiaries the choice of access to well-managed care at lower cost, MA has mushroomed into a massive program, now about to cover more than 50% of all Medicare beneficiaries and costing far more per beneficiary than traditional Medicare ever has.
By gaming Medicare risk codes and the ways in which comparative “benchmarks” are set for expected costs, MA plans have become by far the most profitable branches of large insurance companies …
