We’ve gone on a journey together in which you’ve learned that:
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affordability is a function of insurance and the out-of-pocket costs it imposes on patients
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investment in innovation incentivizes by the promise of drugs being profitable
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profitable doesn’t mean unaffordable as long as people have proper insurance
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to help patients afford proper treatments, we need insurance to be honest and cover what it says it covers, which means ideally requiring that companies claiming to offer health insurance actually offer first-dollar coverage with low/no copays.
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lowering OOP costs for drugs doesn’t mean giving them away to people for free but recognizing that patients already paid for those treatment out of their premiums
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that the vast majority of drugs aren’t fun to take and won’t actually be over-utilized if patients aren’t forced to pay OOP costs (so why is there a copay for chemo?), revealing the injustice of OOP costs
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the mere 8% that America spends on branded medicines provides the incentives for continued innovation
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drug prices are set through a competitive market process of competing plans and often competing drugs
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the society gets a bargain from what it pays for branded drugs as long as they go generic, as most do.
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because, unlike hospitals and doctors, medicines go generic, incentiving investment in the development of new medicines is a strategy for not only improving people’s lives but saving society money.
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medicines restore productivity to not only patients but also caregivers
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medicines offer value even to healthy people by providing us with peace-of-mind that they will be there for us when we need them (which is fundamentally why healthy people buy insurance at all)
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conventional/traditional cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) ignores many of the values (petals) of medicines to undervalue them whereas GCEA acknowledges them to reveal that medicines are worth much more than their market prices.
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while other wealthy countries freeride on the willingness of America’s market to pay what it pays for novel medicines and should pay closer to US prices
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what it takes for us to all continue on the quest to reap the rewards of affordable innovation is to preserve “Market-based pricing for a Patent-defined period of time that is made affordable through proper Insurance, which means low/no out-of-pocket costs. (MPI)”.
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which ultimately means that when you hear someone suggest that novel medicines are too expensive and need to be price controlled to help patients afford them, you now recognize that, as long as those medicines will eventually go generic or else have their prices brought down after a patent-period of market-based pricing, what patients really need to help them afford such novel medicines is proper insurance.
These are all also tenets of the No Patient Left Behind platform.