I Knew It
When I wrote about fixing Medicare, I knew the solutions were too obvious not to be noticed by other people.
One of the people who noticed was Austin Frakt of The Incidental Economist, and he joined others to ask the question: What if Medicare’s drug benefit was more like the VA’s?
The short answer is that Part D would be 40% cheaper than it currently is, saving $14 billion per year, if the plan did nothing but accept the VA’s pricing. If there was a merger of the VA, DoD, and Medicare drug plans, the savings could certainly be expected to be more for all concerned.
Remember, no one is requiring the drug companies to sell to a merged buying group like this, but an entity buying at these quantities has a right to expect the best price available. No one sells to the local independent retailer at the same price that WalMart gets and everyone knows it.
2 comments
Very true Bryan, and I suspect that anyone with half a clue knows it. Trouble is, many of those that do know, have a vested interest in ensuring it never happens! And it’s the same here BTW. We used to have a great Medicare system, Howard decided however to go the US route of vested interests and corruption and screwed it. The current Gov looks like it’s continuing that trend.
They only get away with it because the others (mostly those being screwed) either don’t think they can do anything about it, or can’t be bothered to do anything about it, or are scared tearless to do anything about it! Sadly, the ones trying to do something about it, seem to be in a very small minority.
Meeeahhh!
Inertia is almost as bad as vested interests when it comes to reforming a system. If the change is too abrupt even the people it will help will oppose it for no other reason than it is a change.
I remember I cleaned up a user interface on a program that had grown “organically”, rather than by planning and reduced a five-step process to two steps, because the other three steps were patched on for things that the business no longer did, or were logically part of one of the two remaining processes. The managers had a hissy fit. The users figured it out in about 10 minutes, but the bosses were complaining about it a year later.
Change is a hard sell, which why so much PR is used to implement it. With privatization they start by demonizing the public workers, and then they promise the wonders of the new, modern, up-to-date, did-I-mention-you-get-a-pony private system – that crashes every couple of days and costs twice as much as the old system. Of course, when the price of the privatized system soars it is always because of “inflation” or “petrol prices” or “weather events” which never seemed to affect the original system.
The last thing conservatives want to see are systems analysts who will actually tell them the truth. If you want to be really unpopular, tell someone who wants to “computerize their business” that it will cost too much and reduce efficiency.