PBMs have unscrupulously created an opaque drug pricing system that has yielded riches for them — at the expense of patients and drug companies.
Category: Policy
Small-Molecule Price Controls Are A Big Mistake
The Inflation Reduction Act’s drug price controls may be popular. But by discouraging companies from investing in innovative, accessible drugs, they’ll harm current and future patients in need of effective therapies.
The growing threat to transgender health care: implications for patients, providers, and trainees
The ACLU is currently tracking over 400 anti-LGBTQ bills this legislative session, the highest number on record. Over 150 of these pertain to transgender people, including many targeting health care for transgender youth. As of April 2023, thirteen sta…
Here’s how to fix the public health system in the U.S.
Today, the current health care ecosystem is broken and in need of an overhaul. To start, this country’s high cost of health care is not sustainable, preventing millions of Americans from accessing important health care services. The recent ruling…
Poverty: America’s disease with devastating consequences
I need to tell you about John (not his real name). He is a Cameroonian immigrant who came to the U.S. on a student visa. He waited tables in a popular pub in downtown Houston to earn a little change and support himself through school. Hardworking, cour…
Don’t Expect Life Expectancy To Explain American Health Care
The American healthcare system outperforms the government-dominated systems of comparable countries on any meaningful metric. Simply put, there’s no better place to get sick than the United States.
America’s ailing health care system: How it’s failing patients and doctors
As painfully revealed by the coronavirus pandemic, the American health care system is ailing, plagued by the inefficiencies and greed of big business and for-profit medicine. It is not unlike the virus, attacking vital organs one by one until the who…
Why HIPAA isn’t enough to protect your health data
After all the hours spent in HIPAA training over the years, physicians and other health care workers might think of HIPAA as a powerful regulation. It’s true that HIPAA does require health care workers to follow a number of rules, with pretty har…
How lack of access to clean water is devastating developing countries
Maybe dogs aren’t the only ones drinking water from a toilet bowl. In the United States, we have easy access to clean water. We use culinary water to do our dishes, bathe, wash our cars, and even fill our toilets. Most Americans don’t ever …
Binary medicine harms our gender-expansive patients
The first time I saw a preceptor use the American College of Cardiology’s atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (mercifully, ASCVD) risk calculator, I was hooked. As a first-year medical student, data nerd, and aspiring primary care provider, I …
