The US health insurance industry resents being on the receiving end of surprise bills and price-gouging, so Blue Cross/Blue Shield are spending $55m to have the nonprofit Civica Rx tool up to make generics of off-patent drugs whose sole manufacturers are shkreliing the prices into the stratosphere.
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Tag: medicare for all
Med-tech company repossess veteran’s artificial legs because the VA won’t cover them
Jerry Holliman received Bronze Stars for his military service in Iraq and Vietnam, where he was dosed with Agent Orange. Now 69, Hollman has survived multiple cancers, but lost both his legs to complications from diabetes.
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RIP, Mike Resnick
Mike Resnick, a major figure in science fiction, has died after a brief battle with “a very aggressive form of lymphoma” that was diagnosed in November. He was 77.
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Medicare for All would cut most Americans’ taxes, creating the biggest American take-home pay raise in a generation
When Americans get their paycheck every month, there are a ton of deductions from it — some represent money taken by state governments, some by the feds, but one of the largest line-items is the amount taken to pay a private insurance company for some of the most expensive, least comprehensive medical insurance offered in any country on the planet.
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From Enron to Saudi Arabia, from Rikers Island to ICE’s gulag, how McKinsey serves as “Capitalism’s Consigliere”
On this week’s Intercepted podcast (MP3) (previously), host Jeremy Scahill (previously) takes a long, deep look at the history of McKinsey and Company, whose consultants are the architects of ICE’s gulags, a failed, high-cost initiative to curb violence at Rikers Island that used falsified data to secure ongoing funding — a company whose internal documents compare management consultants to “the Marine Corps, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Jesuits” and whose government contracts bill out freshly hired, inexperienced junior consultants at $3m/year.
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Insulin prices doubled between 2012 and 2016
The historical excuse for pharma monopolists who conspired to rig prices on insulin was that hardly anyone paid full price — everyone got their life-saving, non-optional medicine through health plans that negotiated a knock-down price.
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In any other industry, emergency medical billing would be considered fraudulent
Last summer, MD/journalist Elisabeth Rosenthal’s husband had a bike accident and was seriously injured and taken by ambulance to an emergency room.
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When Republicans say “How will you pay for Medicare for All?” Democrats should answer: “Mexico will pay for it”
The “pay-for game” is that gotcha game that Conservatives like to play, wherein the ridiculous boondoggles favored by the right (billions for Trump’s wall, more than a trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy, massive increases in Pentagon and intelligence agency spending, even a $16 million bomb used for no military reason) can be financed with infinite amounts of deficit spending, while any program that benefits the majority of America needs has to be “fully funded,” generally by making cuts in other programs that benefit the majority of America — something that the idiotic Democratic establishment has bought into.
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Crowdfunding to help science fiction great Mike Resnick pay off the medical bills from a near-death experience
Mitch Wagner writes, “Talented and prolific science fiction writer and editor Mike Resnick, who has written extensively over the course of a long career about colonialism and its legacies, with a particular focus and love for Africa, has had a near-death experience and started a GoFundMe to pay off his medical expenses. I’m a huge fan of Resnick, particularly his novel Santiago and African stories, and I’m saddened to learn about this.”
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American health care’s life-destroying “surprise bills” are the fault of local, private-equity monopolies
Surprise billing — when your urgent or emergency medical care results in massive bills that your insurer won’t cover — are a life-destroying phenomenon for an increasing number of Americans, who not only can’t shop around for an emergency room from the back of an ambulance, but who also have no way to learn in advance whether their visit will generate five- or even six-figure bills.
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